2020 dystopia

Four years ago I set off on a 2-year-journey to photograph the region of Upper Silesia in Poland. The region where history can be seen on every corner. The division between three superpowers, two world wars, three uprisings, greedy exploitation of natural resources and contempt for the natural environment left their scars on the landscape. During those two years I took over 600 photographs, which helped me understand that the region looks like a giant mosaic of leftovers from the past. Upper Silesia is a life-scale jigsaw puzzle. I recreated the experience making a hand-made photo-book called COMPOSITION. The only copy consists of a few dozen photographs set together to visualize the feeling I experienced traveling across the region. While working on the book I realized that due to the complex nature of Upper Silesian landscape, photographs of places miles apart, set aside at random look perfectly matched. Thanks to photography, fragments of different realities, times and places could meet to create new worlds. I developed the idea of SURPHOTOGRAPHY - a mix of surrealism and photography and started creating new, visionary landscapes - utopias born from unexpected encounters of dreams and reality. Over 300 hundred surrealistic landscapes were born. The visions were put on display during two exhibitions held in Silesian art galleries. At the opening, aside from my works, on a table there, I presented 100 selected photographs and asked the guests to take a trip to a dreamland and reconstruct it with the photographs placed on the table. The guests exuberantly plunged into the realm of dreams and fantasies and new utopian citiscapes were born again. Beautiful utopias are short-lived, however, and their foundations only paper thin. At the end of 2019 COVID-19 struck and the world we used to know collapsed and fell apart. Silesian dreamlands lost their grounds. Forced to stay home during the pandemic lock-down I took out the Silesian images again. I cut them into pieces and scattered them on the table the same way the world around me scattered into pieces. I turned the pieces upside down the same way our life turned upside down, and I turned everything into chaos just as the world plunged into chaos. Then, I took a picture to remember what the world became in the spring of 2020.