All Souls’ Day, video
My grandmother’s wooden house, built in 1921, was to be demolished.Original wooden architecture in the countryside is becoming increasingly rare. It is not a legacy of great heroes or warriors, but rather of ordinary people, especially women, who in the past had to take care of the house as well as work hard on the fields. In the video project, I clean my grandmother’s house for the last time before its planned demolition. I open and wash the windows, sweep the floors and hang new curtains. While I do that, my dad visits me to talk about his childhood spent in the house with his parents and eight siblings. Together, we try to start a fire in a tiled stove. We taste the grapes that grow on the roof.
Throughout her life, my grandmother made a living by working on the farm. During the war, she was a witness to genocide—from the window of her house she could see the smoke above the fields where the Nazi crematorium was located. A few meters from my grandmother’s house there used to be a wooden cottage which belonged to her neighbors, a Ukrainian family. No traces remain of the building—it was burned down during Operation Vistula, when most Ukrainians were displaced.
