Depopulated areas undergo an intensive process of natural succession, which is a unique phenomenon on a European scale. Only sometimes one can identify barely noticeable traces of former human presence: overgrown foundations of houses, wells or tombstones. Apple, plum or pear trees blooming in the spring can be unexpectedly encountered in the middle of a forest. However, a great deal of other species of plants can serve as silent witnesses to human presence in those areas. Plants overtake the space once subjugated by people. At the same time, the plants have become continuously reviving witnesses of human presence in those abandoned, once inhabited places. Human-induced changes in the chemical composition of soil and its structure have been significant enough to give these plant species a way to survive for the next 600 years. That’s why the knowledge of these plants can help you find where the resettled villages were located and reconstruct their topography, at the same time providing an extraordinary key to a deeper understanding of that space.

As Paweł Mościcki  wrote in his text Reeding the Weeds:

 The poeticalness of this project begins with listening to the silent protest of the earth that makes abandoned plants endure and grow in defiance of political decisions. The artistic gesture – the extraction of a piece of meadow and its transfer to the gallery – is preceded by research work determining the rationale of a simple and singular gesture. At the intersection of archaeological work and artistic practice is born something that could be called anti-metaphors. These are based on a polemic with historical displacements, those bad metaphors that grow on the living body of historical experience, marking it with unspeakable suffering. The work of anti-metaphors is, therefore, directed against history. At the same time, they are anti-metaphors also because they are no longer expressed solely in language – which is why research alone, without actually transferring the meadow to the gallery, wouldn’t have been enough."

Karolina Grzwnowicz (b. 1984) – a multimedia artist and author of interdisciplinary projects. She graduated from Jagiellonian University, the Faculty of Comparative Literature. She is a holder of a scholarship of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Her projects are based on in-depth research and her audio installations are often rooted in narrative stories. She is fascinated with narrative storytelling in its broadest sense and has a keen interest in the phenomena of transient, ephemeral and disappearing nature. She lives and works in London and Kraków.

Project was realised as a part of Association of Creative Initiatives ‘ę’ 1/1 Master and Apprentice programme. Financed by LOTTO Million Dreams Foundation.