Chernozem, installation, 600x600 cm, loop embroidery (dyed wool)
The work “Chernozem” intertwines the micro-histories of World War II and the contemporary context of the war in Ukraine, in which natural deposits such as fertile farmland are once again the cause of war and genocide. The immediate reason for the installation is the “Mogiła”[Eng. Grave] — an unnamed mass grave from World War II, which is located in my hometown of Koniaczów near Jarosław (Subcarpathia). According to sources I’ve reached, there was a Nazi crematorium in the fields in my home village, where the bodies of murdered Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, as well as prisoners of war – were burned. Their ashes were scattered over the surrounding farmland.
The work is an installation consisting of 12 handmade carpets that are a study of the matter of the earth. Combining the symbolism of a typical home décor element – a carpet – and fertile soil, it signals the still-present traumas of war and genocide in family, domestic, and social spaces. The unprocessed traumas of war over the years have had a destructive effect on relationships in many subsequent generations after the war. Especially in rural and peripheral areas, the experience of war remains unworked for a long time.
One of the points of reference that are important to me are the so-called “non-places of memory” – locations marked by death but, for various reasons, never commemorated. These places are particularly numerous in rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe, as Martin Pollack has emphasized, calling them “tainted landscapes.”
The work was presented in 2022 at the Biała Gallery in Lublin at the exhibition “Time and Loop” (curator: Anna Nawrot) and at the exhibition dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor at the Dim Gallery in Warsaw (curator Ivana Berchak).