Photograph from the "Other City" series by Wojtek Wilczyk and Elżbieta Janicka
Large-format photographs taken from rooftops in the capital city create a visual map of the former Jewish ghetto district of the Second World War. Wojtek Wilczyk and Elżbieta Janicka revive the memory of the thriving city before the war, and the traumatic geography that has been all but stricken from the record
Warsaw today barely resembles the fine capital that stood before the war. Many major streets have been eradicated forever, replaced by empty lots and car parks. The Warsaw ghetto (1940-1943) has also vanished nearly without a trace - just some crumbling remnants in the west of the city, and plaques defining the limits of walls that once kept hundreds of thousands of people trapped in cramped, miserable quarters.
The "post-ghetto" space (a term coined by historian Jacek Leociak) exists in the area set up by the Germans to separate the city's Jewish residents from the rest of the occupied city. It is located between the towering Palace of Culture and Science form the 1950s in the southeast, the Arkadia shopping centre in the north, the New Town, Plac Krasińskich, Krasiński Gardens, Plac Bankowy and the back of the Pasta building in the east, and Żelazna Street, Okopowa Street, the Jewish Cemetery and the Old Powązki Cemetery in the west.
The project was conceived and carried out by two artists working with a 4x5 camera, capturing images on sunless autumn and winter days to avoid the interference of light effects and foliage on the mapping of the street grid. The photographs have been developed in colour, endowing the images with a particular realism that speaks to the present day.
Certain elements of the photographs are repeated, showing various landmarks such as the Palace of Culture and Science or the spot where the Great Synagogue once stood at Plac Bankowy, from different perspectives. The aim is to give the viewer the tools to mentally reconstruct the entire area, while reflecting on the development of postwar Warsaw and the urban planning carried out through the decades.
Past and present intermingle, weaving through vast changes in architectural concepts and varying approaches to society and politics. This is the Other City of Warsaw - a Jewish Warsaw with its own streets, houses of worship, monuments and buildings. It is this alternate metropolis suspended in time that Janicka and Wilczyk attempt to recapture as Poland and the world grapple with issues of memory and forgetfulness, the space between invisibility and memorial.
Photograph from the "Other City" series by Wojtek Wilczyk and Elżbieta Janicka
Wojciech (Wojtek) Wilczyk (born 1961) and Elżbieta Janicka (born 1970) are writers and photographers who have rooted their focus on the exploration of Poland's forgotten territories, in particular areas marked with traces of post-Holocaust legacy: abandoned or converted synagogues or the stricken streets of former Jewish neighbourhoods. In 2011 Janicka published Festung Warsaw, an essay and photo series that takes the reader on a tour of the former ghetto, while at the same time contrasting the facts of history with unpredictable political sentiment in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The pair describe the Other City project as an attempt to reconcile the character of the area and an awareness of the community that was later construed as a site of the Holocaust. It is also a way of invoking memory in a place that has obliterated nearly all traces of the past - both positive and traumatic. They say the project has been put together in a way that
suggests a reflection on subsequent stages of the construction of postwar Warsaw, on concepts of architecture and urbanity, which all come about through a judgment of the past, being at once a way of thinking about the society of today and tomorrow: from egalitarian visions of social architecture through neoliberal rationales on maximising profit without taking into consideration prior assumptions, at the cost of social cohesion. The places shown in the photographs and emblematic - the former hospital named for the Bersohns and the Baumans, the Nożyków synagogue, the former Umschlagplatz - which place the "Other City" within the historical framework of Jewish Warsaw.
The project is supplemented by a map created by cartographer Paweł Weszpiński for Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak’s publication The Warsaw Ghetto: Guidebook to a Non-Existent City, which shows the former city superimposed with the present-day grid of Warsaw, along with symbols indicating several surviving mementos related to the ghetto.
The exhibition is on at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art between the 22nd of June - 28th of July 2013. For more information, see: zacheta.art.pl
Editor: Agnes Monod-Gayraud
Source: press release, own materials
28.06.2013