I have emigrated from Poland, my home country in 1998.
Growing up in poverty and communist regime, I hardly ever looked back and rarely visited Poland in the last 22 years. I come from Lodz, third biggest city in Poland. In the 19th-century the Polish city of Łódź grew from a tiny farming town into a bustling textile industry metropolis at a rate unseen anywhere else in Europe at the time. Poles, Jews, Germans and Russians, who peacefully co-existed there for many years, raised the cosmopolitan city. Today Łódź is a city that is looking for a new identity. What was once the ‘Polish Manchester’, a thriving centre of production, nowadays, after the collapse of the textile industry caused by political changes and globalisation, is more of a ‘Polish Detroit’, a city with a decreasing population and unemployment issues. My project aims to capture the decay of the city, the lost glory, and its painful past. This is an on-going project.
