Pokrzywa i czekoladki. Tangled Timelines
We are sitting around a table. Suddenly, a lake appears.
It is made of words, yet there are swans in it, or is it ducks? I don’t know.
Maybe both, or none at all. We are eating little frozen chocolates in bright blue and pink wrappers. There are no more buildings, only water. It comes flooding from the past into the present. Though perhaps it never left at all. I can taste the stinging nettle sandwich on my tongue, even though we are eating the chocolates.
The combination is strange and surreal, but it tastes like home. The pond, they say, was a happy place. It is nice to hear a happy story among so many sad ones. Yet there is sadness to it still as it dissolves. In the end, all of the stories somehow taste like stinging nettle and chocolate.
A bee stings my mother’s throat. My great-grandmother shows me how not to milk a cow. A bag of wheat falls on her. Squeeze the bottom two fingers, tightly.
The lake gets covered by buildings. A shoebox in my parents’ wardrobe. Documents and photos, a few pieces of jewellery. Dusty glasses.
I stand in the field looking at a house. Topolowa 118 (formerly known as Topolowa 19, before that number 5). A rather small house where my great-grandmother Wiktoria (daughter of Wiktoria and Michał) and her husband Józef (son of Marianna and Michał) used to live. (As well as others, including my mother when she was little). It is a house of stories, layers and pain. It was sold after my grandfather died. I have never stepped inside, only ever wandered the adjacent field.
It’s being transformed yet again. The fence is down for renovations, the roof tiles on the ground. I approach it hesitantly. I touch the foundations, where it is not yet covered with fresh paint. Memories pour through me. Not mine, and mine. From bricks to veins. A dizzying fermentation of memory.
We are sitting around a table. Photographs pass from hand to hand. Stories wobble. So much has never been said. My work unfolds between conversations, between shovelling dirt and pieces of bricks. While hugging a house and going through documents.
My father making tables, my mother drawing the house layout, my aunty showing photographs, and another one serving potatoes. The stories told in between and many others untold bind us. We create a new world together, memories folded into words, into gestures, objects and hopes. I feel the traces. Listen to the neighbours and speak with the spirits. It is a failed archive. A dissolving concoction of hints. Tangled timelines. A shifting, porous creation. Stories with gaps where I find love.
