RYSIA USED TO LIVE HERE...

The artist used the recorded memoirs of Włodzimierz Chętko who spent his youth in Lublin and who remembers the building at 5 Grodzka Street from the time of the war. Anka Leśniak was especially interested in Rysia, Mr. Chętko’s fiancé from that time. In his memoirs she was presented very allusively, but she played a very important role. The artist tries to get into the mind of Rysia, a teenage girl from a good home who had to face the problems of living at the edges of a ghetto. She also deals with the story of their first love. She recreates a certain situation, narrates, but it is the viewers who have to create their own version of the story – based on a suggestion, a photograph, and a hand-sketched map of the Old Town.


Grodzka 5

Project dedicated to the history of the building at 5 Grodzka Street in Lublin. History here is the object of constant searching, tracking, guessing, investigating and consequently – recreating and reconstructing it from preserved fragments. It is still being created. Such activities are triggered by the rich memory of the building, which will be discovered step by step by narrations of individuals – former inhabitants, frequent visitors or workers of institutions located in this building. Dreams, ambitions, as well as frustrations and lost human hopes form the final shape of memories. Individual interpretations, in which truth is mixed with fiction, breed hundreds of possible stories.

The aim of „Grodzka 5_ project is to visualise the timeliness and closeness of history, creative investigation of an old city building history, to give the voice to those who have been forgotten. Along with invited guests and citizens of the Old Town, we want to create new, multi-plot story about a home, on the basis of urban legends or crime stories, with memories which will be altered through the sphere of dreams, desires, non-fulfilment and madness.

Magdalena Ujma /curator/