Fragile Memory 

2024

At the age of sixteen, I left my parents' home. I went far away and spent a long time writing letters to my aging grandparents. And then, many years later, they sent me a parcel from the empty house, a suitcase with a large archive of family photographs and personal belongings of my relatives who are no longer with me. 

It was a painfully long time before I began working with the archive… 

It was hard to relive and comprehend the past, which revealed events to me that changed my memories of my family. There was no longer a single person nearby who could shed light on the history of my family, only letters, photographs and things. The situation between me and the things in the suitcase was an unbearably poignant longing for my loved ones, the suitcase became a ghost from the past, gave birth to the fear of not knowing, the pain of what was missed and the desire to find out what time had hidden. I began to use photography as a tool for establishing contact with things, to lay them out and record them. Through recording, I make visible what is hidden, to experience and feel them is an important stage of recording. 

At the same time, I imagine my memory as elements of the landscape in order to be able to complete, sort them out, go out and build bridges of memory. Working with a personal archive, I restore family ties and identity, similarity of characters, compare my life line and the loved one I resemble. Destroying time boundaries, I enter the past through letters. I see “another me” when I wrote to their relatives 30 years ago. 

This is an opportunity to exist in two spaces at the same time, without any contradictions. Letters make it clear that you exist, but you exist in the form of “another me”. I record, remember and move on. The letters that my grandparents kept, letters and photographs from relatives, open up an understanding of family relationships, love and support, a life that developed differently for all children, and much was not indicated, much was closed to me, ambiguous, now it becomes clear. Grandfather met grandmother before the war, and before his mobilization (he was 19 years old) they got married. He went to the front, sent his portrait to his grandmother, wrote touching words, confessed his love… Two wounds, hospital, front again, second wound to the head, returned home in 1944, in 1945 my aunt was born, a couple of years later my father. 

There are so many faces in the photographs that I cannot identify, and I will no longer know who they were. I compare the inscriptions on the backs with the names, years and faces. I read the signatures and phrases that the sender wrote. And suddenly I find similarities, similarities of faces, similarities of characters, I cling to this opportunity to be close and now with the person in the photo. My sister is a copy of our grandmother, this was the first discovery of working with the archive, and so much became clear, we talked about this with her so much. 

The strong resemblance of my son to his great-grandmother surprised and touched me… My dad’s old cameras arrived, the ones he used to take pictures with in his youth. One of them had a film on it, five photos taken with a long interval of time of his old parents, my grandfather and my grandmother, dad never developed this film. 

This sea of ​​feelings that rocks my consciousness inside, my fragile world of calm…