Julia Stachura: What is your first memory related to photography?
Kamila Kobierzynska: I could echo Marcel Proust - we deal with what we miss. When I was a child I liked to look through photographs by pulling them out of drawers and boxes from time to time, but no one ever told me about them - I just looked at the pictures. I remember one time I found a photo of a baby in a stroller, one of the few black and white shots in the home collection. I asked my mother who was in the shot and it turned out to be me. Most of the frames from the roll from which this photo came were overexposed, it is actually my only photo from early childhood. What was fractious to me was that my siblings, who are a dozen years older than me, have many more such photos, while in my case there was a kind of... breach. Maybe it was because around that time our home camera broke down and no one cared about the continuity of the already small home archive. A little later, my growing up with analog photography, in such a very mundane sense, took the form of commemorating the first day at school or a family event. These are actually things that each of us has in our private archives. Now as I recall these images, there is a bit of nostalgia, but at the same time there is not this "unusual" emotional charge. Another camera arrived at home when I was about six years old. It was a simple Kodak equipment, without a manual mode - rather, the joy of taking pictures was the most important thing. The camera was just one of the equipment in the house, no one showed me how it worked, how to take correct pictures, I just started making my first attempts and waiting for the Fujifim envelope.
So you started your adventure with photography very early!
- Yes, at the time it was pure magic for me, such a delight for an amateur in the positive sense of the word. A wonderful experience to have only once.
Do you remember what those first pictures looked like?
- Whole plates were filled with blurry pictures of cats (laughs). Of course, the shots were taken from too close a distance, from the hand of a child chasing a dog in the backyard. Mainly Kreska (a dachshund) and Kitka (a "rooftop" cat) were my companions, companions for adventures that I wanted to document somehow at the time. Coming back to myself from that time, I can't determine what exactly the intention was - I can only assume that love for these creatures. I was not keen on taking pictures of people, which later changed dramatically... Art began to interest me early on, I remember very clearly the impression made on me by one photo from an exhibition World Press Photo at the CCA gallery in Opole from 2002. It depicted an airplane, captured against the sky, flying directly into one of the World Trade Center towers. The echo of that shot returned 20 years later in my exhibition Sehnsucht opened on the 20th anniversary of the attack, September 11, at Rodriquez Gallery in Poznan.
After high school you went to study art, chose Poznan UAP, major - photography?
- At that time it was the Multimedia Communication major, which turned into the first Photography major in Poland at the Faculty of the same name. From the beginning of my studies I was close to the style of work of Jaroslaw Klups, who was the youngest studio leader at the Faculty, a person with incredible enthusiasm for work, and at the same time extremely patient and understanding. Even then I was very keen on practice, on developing my workshop and sensitivity to the matter, which was not so obvious for other studios - I read a lot of theory on my own. During the preparation of my bachelor's degree, Jarek gave me a lot of credit for the conceptual part of my project. The area I was interested in at the time concerned the analysis of relationship models, certain patterns we repeat while living in society. This is how the work was created Fading, concerning the relationship with my father and with my partner at the time, and referring to the Freudian scheme. Today I look at it a little differently, at that time it was only a preliminary understanding - during the preparation of my doctoral dissertation I expanded the area of research. The dissertation When the cherry blossoms bloom. Postmemory and the transmission of trauma treats patterns and relational patterns in quite some detail, and addresses the subject of the inheritance of memory of difficult events, mainly World War II. Referring to the transmission we receive from previous generations, i.e. intergenerational trauma, I will point out that only three generations back have been subjected to reflection on trauma and its transmission to their descendants. In addition to genes, each of us also inherits extra-generational (although the name may be misleading, since genes are involved in this process) memory of anxiety, various mental disorders or a tendency to somatic diseases. Harmful factors such as stress, aggression, anxiety, trauma, medications taken, poor diet, etc., leave their mark on the next generations. The experiences of our ancestors leave traces in us. Inherited, they constitute a kind of limitation on individual development or impair the perception of various aspects. As psychiatrists note, the phenomenon of trauma transmission affects people born after World War II, so this kind of trauma is still attributed to at least three more generations, and only now can we study it. This self-discovery took me years. Now, from the perspective of a lecturer, I think that the most valuable thing for students is precisely to create space for their own reflection. I have been observing this for several years, the pandemic has highlighted in young adults the need to define their identity. The Faculty is attended by very sensitive, unique people, who are not infrequently bothered by something in the structure and functioning of society. Above all, they are seekers. Their contestation is phenomenal, but as I see it - also difficult and requiring a resilience that they are not yet able to use. I think some of the lecturers perceive it similarly, so we try to support as much as possible, build a community and share our experiences of art practice.
Guided tour of the exhibition Naked Nerve at BWA Wrocław Główny, 2021 (from left, Joanna Rajkowska, Kamila Kobierzyńska, Anna Mituś). Photo by Mateusz Kowalczyk
Now you are working together with Jaroslaw Klups in the Latent Image Laboratory, right?
- Yes, we have had the pleasure of working together for several years now, and I think we form a harmonious duo. The studio was founded by Professor Witold Przymuszała, Jarek was his assistant. The new name of the studio formally established a year ago and refers firstly to the technical definition of an image, which needs a medium to reveal it, that is, to evoke it. This aspect of materiality, or the matter of the image, is very important to us; secondly, it refers to the memory image, something that is not yet fully named and formulated, but is in us. This also involves working with archives, vernacular photography, left-over or abandoned photos, which can lead us precisely to latent images - in the sense - to emotions or memories that we have paradoxically forgotten. We try to search with students for that sensitive area that they have not yet identified... It does not always have to be something unpleasant, in my understanding it is such a fragile goods .
Marianna Michalowska wrote in the context of latent images, among other things, about vernacular, family photographs, carrying personal experiences, memories of smells and tastes, but also generational traumas. In your creative work you address similar themes....
- While working on my doctoral project, I drew on the testimonies and descriptions of World War II witnesses to better contextualize my family accounts, but also to reflect on certain social phenomena. The concept of witnessing is important to me, and as the constant revisiting of this event from more than eighty years ago shows - witnessing is still needed. I am from a generation of political transition, full of tensions. In my family, East meets West - my mother's family are displaced persons coming from the territory of today's Ukraine (once Poland), while my father's family came from the territory of Germany. In both cases, after the war, they were people starting from scratch - on the material side, but also on the relational side. Poland at the time was in a national upsurge and there was no room to work through the trauma. So these tensions kept recurring somewhere in the history of specific people - in this case my grandmother Gienia (née Gross), who was born on Polish territory, but to a family of German settlers. Peculiarly, she cherished what was German about her, even though she lived with Poles. Usually she didn't talk much about those times, some stories were probably too painful to share, only after the death of Stasio, her husband, something broke and could come to the surface. All these frictions, uncomfortable topics, began to interest me and pushed me to learn, defuse and rework my family's history. The things left behind by Gieni spoke more than she did. It should be noted that it was a lot of stuff for a person living modestly - she simply accumulated luxury goods by locking them up in rooms where no one was allowed to enter, hiding them in rooms-chests. A distinctive house with a smell of dampness, full of trinkets and chipped crockery, clocks chiming a dozen minutes at a full hour, decorated with wallpaper from the 1960s - this was only the surface layer under which we found a second life - a parallel, rich life of Gienia. Paradoxically, there were few photos in these holdings, she built relationships with objects, she liked to know that they were - they were counted and entered in the inventory, but never used.
I remember that your exhibition Sehnsucht /ˈzeːnzʊxt/. at the Rodriguez Gallery, very characteristically, began with the smell of cherries.
KK: Yes, that was the summary of my PhD When the cherry blossoms bloom. Postmemory and the transmission of trauma -. There is some question potential in this title. I wanted to combine two aspects: the smell of cherry blossoms, which, on the one hand, is associated with the introduction to summer, evoking pleasant memories; on the other hand, as a chemical compound (acetophenone) has been used in studies conducted on mice to trace the transmission of trauma. According to the study, it is this smell that the mammalian brain responds most strongly to among many other smells. In my work, I treat this very symbolically, but also refer to psychological patterns and patterns that we unconsciously (re)carry from generation to generation. The trauma of World War II became the starting point for my research, during which I gained a great awareness of how my family was affected. Putting all the pieces together, filled with testimonies from witnesses of displacement and the war itself, I ended up experiencing secondary trauma myself and was unable to continue my work - even for weeks. That grounding feeling returned in February, when I learned that Russia had invaded Ukraine. The thought occurred to me that what keeps people in such extreme situations is togetherness. This is the only thing that can be developed and had during such a powerful, devastating experience
JS: Have you had a chance to talk to people in your family who have experienced war?
KK: Unfortunately, not while I was working on my doctorate - these reflections came to me once everyone was gone. The topic itself had already intrigued me as a child, a lot of questions were asked to my grandmother Ewa, who had been displaced, I had the impression that my mother was also hearing these stories for the first time (just as my father had listened to Gienia's stories not long before her death). This is also how I touched the realm of the subconscious in my work - the stories I heard already as an adult dreamed repetitively in my childhood. I felt like I had solved a mystery. After death of the first generation The boundary of my status in the family has shifted - from granddaughter to daughter. It is my parents who are now the oldest generation. I think I have gained a new kind of responsibility that has taken me back to the past.
JS: Your artistic work is intertwined with extremely private family stories on the one hand, and research curiosity and a scientific approach to trauma on the other. How did you deal with the weight of this subject? Did you feel that Kamila the granddaughter and daughter and Kamila the artist and researcher were the same or the opposite?
KK: Through personal entanglements, my family was divided, and I always looked on, seeing a chill in the ties between the generations. Everyone took part in schematic practices that maintained some semblance. We visited Gienia once a year out of a sense of duty... I looked at her more as a grandmother figure, a woman with whom I am connected to my father through blood ties and nothing else. As Roland Barthes wrote in "Discourse of Love" -. fading - fading - refers both to the physical process and to the underachievement of a loved one. Barthes after the definition of the word fading cites an excerpt Guermantes pages by Marcel Proust, when he writes about the image: "a mother with marked sternness and coldness." He adds, "The fading of the object of love is the frightening return of the Evil Mother, the unexplained regression of love (...)," which illustrates well the relationship of Gienia with my father, as well as Eve with my mother, and later also both my parents with me. This common pattern of behavior, repeated on both sides of the family, makes up my genetic inheritance. In psychology, we deal with cognitive schemas, or basic elements of knowledge about the social world - they are the organization of experiences in relation to events, people or objects. They are formed through specific experiences and contain generalized knowledge derived from these experiences. Once they exist, they allow us to make sense of what is just happening, they also suggest how to behave in a given situation. This is, of course, a necessary skill for functioning, but patterns can act destructively. Negative patterns developed in childhood or adolescence are perpetuated during life, and are sometimes difficult for the person burdened with them to point out. But they certainly guide our behavior, especially when it comes to relationships. And although I have everything methodologically worked out, I know what to call these processes, I am able to write it out - I will never get to the bottom of it. This appears as a metaphor about the causality of art... I touched on this topic in my work 855/1 - is the inventory number of an abandoned plot of land in my hometown of Zdzieszowice - on which I tried to revive the activity of the local community, unfortunately with poor results. The plot lived together with us only when I was there. In conclusion, the things we do to ourselves in our little bubbles actually have the greatest impact on ourselves.
JS: In some of your recent projects, you also focus on hidden processes, invisibility and relationships, but this time interspecies, from the perspective of non-human protagonists - pigeons, as you discuss in the works Pigeon's Tale from the exhibition Visit at the Zamek Cultural Center in Poznań, as well as installations It was a fancy Pigeon shown at the exhibition SAFE SPACE At the Dizajn Gallery of BWA Wrocław.
KK:Pigeon's Tale is a site-specific, built in the Castle, in a place burdened with a very turbulent history, sympathies and antipathies of the residents of Poznan. Looking at how the Imperial Quarter is built up, this is one of the taller buildings. Pigeons by nature are birds that seek high, rocky areas where they build their nests - quite frail and inhospitable. They are patient observers. Of course, they have become accustomed to the hustle and bustle of cities, and can be found around apartment blocks and high-rise buildings, so the Castle has proven to be an ideal place for them probably since its inception. Urban pigeons can play an extremely important and unexpected role. For people, watching and listening to birds is something to calm and soothe the nervous system. Being in a forest or park, hearing birds singing, we know that nothing is threatening us - such an atavism that few people are aware of. In the context of the Castle, I thought of the building as a property passing from hand to hand, changing its function, being rebuilt, being a symbol of power. What remains constant are its tenants - the pigeons. In my work, I created an alternate history in which the Castle belongs to them - the bird rulers. In the place where the imperial throne currently is, I placed a blue silk cushion with a brass key, which symbolically can be put on the pigeon's neck. It was designed to combine the symbol of the pigeon with a reproduction of the key from the municipal coat of arms of Poznan. The blue cushion is a link to a larger work that can be seen in the hallway that precedes it, where I hung two greatly scaled portraits of pigeons on silk made in cyanotype, depicting an empress and an emperor. I photographed the birds on the grounds of the Castle, and one of the portraits shows a pigeon, just with this key. There is a certain irony in this work, but also an attempt to draw attention to these beautiful creatures.
The other part of my pigeon fixation is with breeding farms where creatures are genetically modified. I come from Opole Silesia, where pigeon breeders are thriving, even on my family estate there were often breeders' conventions and pigeon competitions. Interestingly, a pigeon born in a particular place will always return to it. This is due to the part of the brain that receives the electromagnetic waves of the Earth. What fascinated me about breeding pigeons is that from the basic species of rock pigeon, almost four hundred different varieties have evolved. Man began to crossbreed pigeons not only in terms of performance and their sporting and flight capabilities, but also in terms of appearance. As Joseph Beuys said - there is an incredible need for creative expression in each of us. From all these refinements and cross-breedings come out beautiful, but often mutilated, not fully mobile birds, created mainly out of aesthetic needs. I evoke this in a work currently on view at BWA Dizajn (exhibition SAFE SPACE, curated by Agata Połeć) in Wroclaw. It was a fancy Pigeon is a collection of peculiar pigeon creatures. An important aspect of this work is that it was premiered right in Wroclaw. It was there that Pablo Picasso drew a dove of peace on a napkin in 1948, at the first post-war World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace.
JS: The pigeons are also associated with the war period, which is a recurring theme in our conversation....
KK: Yes, pigeon breeding in Poland began just after World War II, which was extremely popular at the time. Pigeons were raised mainly for food reasons. I started reading post-war textbooks on the subject and browsing atlases and saw these phenomenal photographs, often taken in makeshift conditions.
JS: It was a fancy Pigeon you combine photography with glass. Why did you choose this particular medium?
KK: During a walk during the pandemic, I noticed traces of shattered pigeons (so-called angels) on the windows of the University of Life Sciences. The photographic nature of this trace was so amazing to me at the time that I decided to explore the subject further. I collected a cross-section of the last few decades and created a kind of very subjective visual collection, which I later transferred to glass and mirrors, constructing a kind of shelter that is, however, easily violated. I printed everything on various types of glass - reinforced, tinted, as well as mirrors. The work is exposed next to a shop window, so it naturally comes into play with daylight. The format of the photograph - 50 x 60cm - refers to the classic proportions of large format, as well as the matte. Older color photographs were often taken on slides, so I also evoke the diapositive image. In the end, the whole thing looks attractive and disturbing - again, the Freudian Unheimliche...
Exhibition SAFE SPACE in Dizajn Gallery BWA Wrocław can be seen until 18.09
