JULIA SOKOLNICKA POSTCARDS FROM POLAND
The selected photos are a part of the “Postcards from Poland” series shot between 2012 and 2013, at the time when Julia Sokolnicka was almost always on the road. The constant state of moving allowed her to capture a change of scenery historically speaking, to visually document a transition toward something. The old and rotten slowly being wiped out, the cheap and poor, gaining stability and wealth.
Bielsko-Biala
Train to Katowice from Warsaw
Absolutely everything for 2 złoty
“Either he bites you or I’ll shoot you.”
Łomianki, suburb of Warsaw
Bus station mozaique,
covered by furniture commercial,
covered by Promo poster
Bus stop in Kielce with a legendary Yugoslavian kiosk
Bus stop in Warsaw, Tuesday Morning
Bytom, Cafe Rene
Cracow vitrine
Gas station close to Kielce
Hotel in the Lubelskie Voivodeship
Road to Tatra mountains, between Cracow and Zakopane
Locked garbage storage, Warsaw
Metaloplastyka,
ashtray or plant stand, provincial bus stop
Milk Bar in Cracow
Morning fog on a way to Katowice
Papierówki are semi wild apples that grow in city and villages. They are tiny and bitter sweet. Their seller was not at the stand.
Warsaw Summer Fashion, City Centre
Solarium in Andrychów
Street in Bydgoszcz, at Camerimage
The selected photos are a part of the “Postcards from Poland” series shot between 2012 and 2013, at the time when I was almost always on the road. I was working as a costume designer, mostly with short student films. Simultaneously, I tried to self-produce and direct my two documentary films—“Side Roads”, that I have finished in 2015 and “Luth”. I was rather poor, and as a remedy for such state of things I just kept on moving. The work on “Side Roads” included hitchhiking all over Poland, and all the other labour I was involved with was fuelled by cheap transportation, bad accommodation, and lots of passion. The pictures from the series were fast snaps, often candid, usually made on a move with some luggage in one hand. The constant mobility allowed me to capture a change of scenery historically speaking, to visually document a transition toward something. The old and rotten slowly being wiped out, the cheap and poor, gaining stability and wealth. I trained in attentive gaze and tried to organise the blurb of images and creative stimulants I happened to be in. It later became my research method and led to devising my own way of working with larger archives.
JULIA SOKOLNICKA, born in Warsaw in 1983, is an experimental and documentary filmmaker, writer, and researcher. Her practice moves between social philosophy, video, and performance. She studied Philosophy at Warsaw University and Film Directing at Wajda School and Katowice NFTS. In 2016, she graduated from the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam with an Artistic Research in Film degree. In her current projects, she’s working with social choreographies, the notion of Realness, simultaneous narratives and big archives. Her projects “Digital Nomads” and “Social Choreographies” focus on community bonding and social anthropology. Both projects address the utopias of solidarity as well as the problems of multicultural societies and combine performance art and cinema through formal experiments and theoretical exploration. Julia lives and works in Amsterdam. She’s a coordinator of the “Hearth” Artistic Research in Film program hosted by DeAppel gallery. She’s a co-creator of Researcher’s Office and Professional Standards Network for Artists activation groups and a performative intervention group “Physical People”. Find more of her work here: http://juliasokolnicka.com/