TIFF Residency Artist Wroclaw (Poland) -Residence Programme

---

During their three-week stay in Wroclaw, artists will explore the city by focusing on its resources: architecture, places, objects and people – all being elements of its identity. Particular attention is paid to those which, as a result of the modernization changes, are considered to be unimportant, have been forgotten or have been rejected. While reflecting on reintegration and meaning of these resources into the city’s circulation, artists will take a closer look at the areas where the largest urbanization processes have taken place. Particular attention is devoted to the revitalization of the city and its effects, places where objects gain second life such as flea markets, street stalls, as well as inhabitants and their histories.

War and conflict have always produced collateral damage. A lot of buildings have fallen down because of being on the target path. However, buildings are not usually destroyed because they obstruct, but because they are the aim. The destruction of culture, buildings, books and often, art is the consequence, that could be applied indiscriminately, to all wars. The destruction of cultural goods is part of a conscious strategy to attack and destroy the collective memory, the history and the identity of a nation. One of the ways to get rid of the history is by removing all its physical traces.

Understanding that memory has layers. Any present identity is formed by different realities in the shape of layers. These hidden realities behind the frontal perspective are superposed in a series of formal stratifications. Therefore, in an analogous way, the observation of the different layers of the piece, from a documentary and archaeological approach, offers the reflection of the different vanishing states of each of these layers. Thus, it is an exercise of memory contemplation, a study of the accumulative and generational process of memory through temporal development.

The present is a volatile moment through which the future becomes the present. If the present is ephemeral, what can we say about photography which was invented as a way to “register” the present and its presence has always been linked to memory? Any representation is a pure reflection of an event that has already happened. If the present is a segment, so is its representation. Each fraction turns into a symbol which contains the possibility to discover a meaning, or maybe, it reveals the impossibility of any complete synthesis. Taking into account this statement, we will suggest appreciating the images, fragmentary and discontinuous, as a fleeting reflection of a transitory present