SPUTNIK PHOTOS

Ela Polkowska, Splinter

In today’s sterile world, there is no room for mess. We want to purify the world and set clear boundaries. Things that do not work, we immediately throw away, replacing them with new ones. Everything should be perfect, everyone should be happy. We transfer dark areas into our unconsciousness and pretend that they do not exist. And yet sometimes something twinges.

For almost a year I went regularly to a small village at the edge of Poland. I visited a house that should have collapsed a long time ago. The people who lived there kind of wanted to deny that only order can function. They created a world around them that looked like a warehouse of objects filling space no matter if they worked or not. Things lost their meaning and created a multi-layered background. Each time I was there, they were in a different place, and the people who lived there were still trying to sort out the chaos. This world at the edge of Poland seemed strange yet at the same time attractive. I wanted to believe that this pile would never collapse. And yet the mess turned out to be impossible to control. Everything started to break, or perhaps it continued to exist as always – flowing in its usual disorder.