All Souls’ Day, video
My grandmother’s wooden house built in 1921 was slated for demolition. Nowadays it is increasingly rare to find original wooden architecture in the villages. This is a heritage not related to great heroes and warriors, but to ordinary people, especially women, who in the past, in addition to hard agricultural work, also had to take care of the house. In the video work, I clean my grandmother’s house for the last time. I open and wash the windows, sweep the floor, and hang fresh curtains. During the activity, my dad visits me and reminisces about his childhood spent in this house with his parents and eight siblings. Together we attempt to light a fire in the tiled stove. We try the grapes that grow on the roof. My grandmother earned her living by farming. During the war, she witnessed the genocide – from the window of this house one could see the smoke in the fields where the Nazi crematorium was located. A few meters from her grandmother’s house also stood the wooden cottage of a neighboring Ukrainian family, of which there is no trace today. Their house was burned down during the days of Operation Vistula, during which most Ukrainians were displaced.