Photo exhibition, book promotion and conversation with the author / 15.02.2023 / 17:00 / BPMG, 12a Staszica St.
"365. ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEMORY. GNIEZNO 2022" - is a year-long literary and photographic project, which from beginning to end is dedicated to the city where the author of the project has lived, worked and created for 53 years. It is, spread over successive days of the year 2022, a linearly developing story about a place on Earth, a point on the map, a story in which life and all the related personal and professional adventures of the author become a kind of pretext for showing, or perhaps just reminding Gniezno (and its transformations) as a small homeland. The thing takes place mainly on the level of autobiographical storytelling, but also on the level of reflection about time and space, in which our world happens and every individual human existence lasts. In a nutshell, the author takes the reader on a journey through the nooks and crannies of his own memory, from which emerges the Gniezno that no longer exists, but about which it may be worth remembering, because in the past of the 70s, 80s, 90s and the most recent - already the 21st century, which is the past of each of us, hides our Gniezno fate. A fate that not only defines our here and now, but is also the key to a common, collective memory of the city - as the author put it in his story - "a city with a great past and an undoubted future." The author's personal past connected with Gniezno is only 53 years old, but it is, after all, also the past of our grandparents and parents, a past to which our children will someday refer (or are already referring), wishing to understand the Gniezno of their youth and to accept or confirm by their own experience the fact of its many faces, as is usual in the life of a city and people. The short texts presented here were created in real time throughout 2022, and their literary dimension is reinforced by the author's own photographs of Gniezno from 2008-2017. These photos act as illustrations (aesthetic, topographical, but also historical) and are only rarely an explicit supplement to the content of the prose passages that precede them. The reader will find in them places that are no longer there, or that are changing and passing away into another dimension, a dimension of the dynamically happening, fluid, unpredictable present.
365 - Archaeology of Memory. Gniezno 2022, PP-petibon Publishing House 2023, pages 372, 21 x 21 cm, 183 texts (even pages) and 183 photographs of Gniezno (odd pages). The book can be purchased from the author for 85 zl. (this is the cost of printing one copy), as well as at a meeting promoting the book at the price of 50 zloty.