In 2005, the artist photographed unfinished houses. These abandoned constructions are a fine illustration of people’s aspirations during the economic boom time.
Pustola came up with the idea of documenting derelict houses while working with Mark Power, a photographer from Magnum Photos agency, who was taking pictures in Poland for his book The Sound of Two Songs. Pustola acted as his local guide.
Abandoned construction sites caught their attention during numerous trips around the country. Pustola saw unfulfilled ambitions and desires in those neglected skeletons in the middle of nowhere.
The photographer’s intuition was confirmed in 2007, when the reporter Tomasz Kwaśniewski decided to make a journalistic investigation into the buildings in the pictures. His article, "A House I Don’t Want To Live In", published in Duży Format, recounted stories of families divided, loans taken during the boom time, and painful memories of forsaken plans.
In the article, Pustola commented on his series:
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My photographs are an attempt to visualise the dark side of turbocapitalism. The most astonishing aspect is that the houses are completely unprotected, as if someone had left them behind, and wanted to forget about them. They are the quintessence of gloom and failure.
The works were first displayed at the Undiscovered/Unspoken exhibition at Warsaw’s Teatr Nowy in 2005, and later shown in Spain, which was experiencing its own economic crisis at the time.
Originally written in Polish, translated by AG, edited by MB, Dec 2018