Self-aware memory by Magdalena Ujma

Innocent Colonies is a tricky title. It sounds like it was taken from a movie or a novel. It is full of poetry and carries the promise of something pleasant. It arouses memories of childhood, when time passed slowly, the world was colorful and safe, and life was saturated with sensations that tasted like ice-cream on a stick. The word “colonies” is used because among most Poles it evokes summer trips. According to the Dictionary of the Polish Language, this first meaning of this word refers to an organized holiday stay for school-aged children and youth, and this meaning takes precedence over the meaning that refers to the possession of a state that is politically dependent on and economically exploited by it and also over the subsequent meaning quoted in the dictionary that refers to a group of people of the same nationality living in a specific area in a foreign country. Added to the word “colonies,” the term “innocent” lends a blissful, idyllic character.

At Katarzyna Swinarska’s exhibition, these seemingly mild words foretell something other than their most obvious meanings: namely, they signal a courageous journey into the abyss of family memory. The dictionary definitions I quote above intertwine in a murderous grip. In short, the artist ventures into the territories of landowners and peasants. She reaches back to times before the Second World War and to the then prevailing social relations, the system of which disappeared irretrievably following the turmoil of the war together with the then existing shape of Polish culture. And you have to know that the exhibit Innocent Colonies touches on a topic that has recently enjoyed extensive discussion. This work, which is a kind of visual essay, is a perfect reflection of one of the themes Andrzej Leder examines in his much discussed book Prześniona rewolucja published a few years ago. Leder discusses the irreversible, violent change wrought by the war and the Soviet domination that followed it; he refers to this political and social breakdown as a revolution. According to him, the citizens of the Second Polish Republic, and later the People’s Republic of Poland, were not agents, but rather passive subjects, although most of them also became beneficiaries, of that revolution. Today, we live in the long shadow of this involuntary coup, and the price Poland paid for enormous population growth, including that of peasants, was the disappearance of the aristocracy. The revolution took place on the aristocracy’s dead body. Expropriating landowners of their wealth was one thing, but banishing this group from Polish culture, taking away their power to determine its shape—this was an extremely important consequence of what happened. 

Through the lens of family memory, Innocent Colonies focuses on the great history and the social processes that occur inexorably. The specific language of remembering, its codes, and the unconscious beliefs revealed in the silences between words that continued long after the end of the world that created them are touched on by Katarzyna Swinarska in the dozen or so paintings, films, objects, and installations that comprise her undertaking. The artist examines the lifestyle cultivated by her own relatives, who lived in a very distant, but not distant, past. Her work reveals an invisible heritage that grandmothers and mothers pass down to granddaughters and daughters in good families that are wealthy not only in material goods but also in symbolic capital. And, most importantly, she performs surgery on a living body, her own, her personal history, and perhaps a little bit of it that hurt her.

Let us remember that the examples taken from the artist’s family should be treated as part of a larger whole, as a mirror that reflects preserved social systems. The word “heritage” itself is not very reliable today; it is worn out from too frequent use by cultural officials, but Innocent Colonies  is all about heritage. What is addressed is an inheritance that is not only the general good and the property of a great community (i.e., the nation), but one that exists because it is embodied in private, family, and personal customs and traditions. This set of values, which is heritage on a microscale, is found in family messages and the life roles of family members, but also in the attire they wore and in the positions their bodies assumed, when, for example, they posed for photos.

The paintings hung in the exhibition are a sign of this heritage. The gallery sounds with their  echoes; their visual afterimages resonate. The paintings include canvasses in bright tones painted with mastery that are seductive and poignant. Filled with plants, they are a distant reference to what was hanging on the walls of salons. I do not mean they are an exact repetition of topics or forms; rather, I point out the very role of the discipline of painting and easel paintings in Western art. Their patrons, collectors, and connoisseurs came from privileged social strata or aspired to them. Such art was called “high” to emphasize its elitism. It was a kind of language for the initiated, whose acquaintance with it was an entrance card into the world of the elite. Katarzyna Swinarska shows how very phantom-like this noble-intelligentsia tradition is. It is a tradition to which one aspires widely in a country in which it is improper to reveal one’s peasant origin. The forms of this noble-intellectual world are beautiful and empty inside, as though, under the seductive shell, there lurks loss.  

She

In addition to the autobiographical motifs, there is also a second thread. And this thread is, in fact, even stronger than the theme of the posthumous life of the landed gentry linked to the title Innocent Colonies, and it adds a new dimension to the exhibition that goes beyond historiosophical reflections on family and social memory. And here we have the appearance of a foreign woman, Olga Kachurovska, who is unrelated to the artist’s family. And thanks to her, this ghostly, phantom world of frozen feelings and faded memory, which still haunts today, is set in motion and comes alive. It is thanks to the temporary economic migrant from Ukraine who is staying with the artist’s family that stronger, warmer feelings appear. It is her presence that opens Polish women’s hearts and encourages them to show their emotions. 

This is despite Olga Kachurovska living outside her own family, having given up her private life, spending her days outside her own home, and not speaking her own language on a daily basis. She is a stranger and, like the servants of old, she works for a better-off, foreign family with which she spends most of her time. She experiences loneliness and being cut off from her roots. She is often sad, she cries and experiences longing. But what is most important is that she allows herself to feel these feelings at all. It would be the easiest thing to say that she is a victim of today’s “innocent” colonization. Because the mechanisms of domination are universal. Just as, many years ago, a Ruthenian peasant woman left her own cottage and baby to serve as a lady’s wet nurse in the mansion, who, as it happens, was Katarzyna Swinarska’s great-grandmother, so too Olga has left her home to look after the artist’s grandmother. We are still dealing with the same pressure that power exerts, and the only difference lies in the costuming. In the Eastern Borderlands, which were a type of Polish colony, the equivalent of the overseas territories of Western powers, this power was feudal, while today it operates through economic pressure.

A foreign woman, who plays the role of caregiver and nurse, becomes close to the creator of the exhibition. It was from the meeting of Olga and Katarzyna, the caregiver and the descendant of the family, a Ukrainian emigrant and an artist, that the venture named Innocent Colonies developed. It grew out of solidarity between two women from completely different worlds, out of their mutual support and empathy. The idea of ​​the parallelism of women’s fate and community of experiences speaks from this understanding. This seems to be what the artist is seeking, and the condition for this understanding is to respect the Ukrainian heroine in the artist’s creative project. In Innocent Colonies, this appears in specific situations; it is characterized in Olga’s feelings and letters to her husband full of longing, but it also appears as a refuge of warmth, acceptance, and a sense of security. It appears next to the figure of Katarzyna Swinarska’s aged grandmother and the artist herself, which we see in the films presented at the exhibition. The Grandmother plays herself, while Swinarska plays her own great-grandmother from the estate near Vinnitsa, the one where the Ukrainian nurse was employed. Olga plays the role of a more feminine woman, who takes over their mothering or caregiving functions, which convention does not allow them to perform. Swinarska’s meeting Olga certainly prompted the artist to examine her own family traditions more critically. Her grandmother’s attitude toward Ukrainians shifts, because Kachurovska has a beneficial influence on her, which is shown touchingly in one of the films in the exhibition. In this way, a pact is entered into that rises above the official, inflamed version of Polish-Ukrainian historical contacts and over the memory of both nations that contain lists of the wrongs inflicted by both sides. It seems like a happy ending.

Household conventions 

Women inhabit Innocent Colonies. Men are absent, although through them there comes suffering. That which first binds relationships among the female inhabitants of the colonies is power, or domination, and its opposite, subjugation. The old woman and her caregiver. The former lady of the manor and the wet nurse. All invisible housewives, “ideal wives” and their servants. If, then, non-hierarchical partner relationships form between heroines, they are pushed to the margins of their world and condemned to be outsiders. This is what happens to the relationship between Olga and Katarzyna. 

Swinarska sees herself and other women in domestic circumstances. The home is heritage, culture, and tradition, which becomes a convention. Conventions are the hidden characters of Colonies. And these conventions, or customs, supported by the words “it has always been thus,” the feeling that what must be must be, or that it cannot be otherwise, are the mainstay of tradition that provides a sense of rootedness and belonging. Convention is the seat of reflex, non-reflective memory, that imparts a sense of controlling reality. Conventions and customs also affect physical memory, which is the automatic selection of body positions and gestures and the tone and modulation of the voice that shift according to circumstance.  

Conventions speak for us; this is how culture speaks, and bodies repeat the beliefs of conventions without reflection. Behavior appears that is appropriate to the place on the map of social hierarchies and roles occupied by the female inhabitants of the colonies. The Ukrainian woman represents the side of the body and the affect. Vigorously expressed feelings, cordiality belong to her. In the juxtaposition of the binary opposites of culture-nature she is clearly located on the side of the latter, characterized by spontaneity and warmth. Olga expresses herself best through singing, because when she speaks, she does so a little awkwardly, like a child. In the film entitled Innocent Colonies, Olga lies on a metal bed. Her dress is a white nightgown, and therefore a private garment, suggesting softness, gentleness, surrender. Kachurovska lies leaning on her side in an uncomfortable pose. The nightgown falls about her in folds, suggesting that her body is soft and passive.

In the film entitled Innocent Colonies, Katarzyna is the opposite to the Ukrainian woman. She stands in a stiffly, unmoving position, her dress holding her upright, her tone of voice official, as she directs her cold gaze at Olga. The outfit worn by Katarzyna, who is playing the role of a Polish lady, is a black dress buttoned up to the neck and a white apron. The body has no right to be visible in any way, because the body and patriotism cannot exist side by side. The black of her outfit directs thoughts toward patriotic content, and specifically toward national mourning expressed after the catastrophes of the Uprisings. Swinarska speaks in a cool, categorical tone. The shape of this form, which the heroine of the film assumes perfectly, is traced in the installation The School for Wives. In this multifaceted mosaic, in which, among other things, female portraits by Swinarska’s brush and fragments of pre-war guides for perfect ladies of the house are juxtaposed, a strictly defined set of social expectations for women from the upper social strata is drawn. They could feel locked in by them as if in a cage.

The beauty of colonies

The exhibition Innocent Colonies tempts with its beauty, which is hidden in estheticized layouts of works, overlapping visual perspectives, in the carefully selected saturated colors of the walls and ceiling, and in the seductive side of visuality. In one room of Innocent Colonies, the artist shows monumental paintings depicting large plants, flowers with winding stems and fleshy petals, botany charging over the surfaces of canvas. These great images bear the function of condensing the emotional content of the exhibition. One detects in them great passion, ardor, a cluster of swarming emotions that the heroines of the films are incapable of expressing. In the next part of the exhibition, however, other paintings prevail, but these are even more violent. They are, in turn,  tension themselves, consisting of tangled, dynamically painted black spots contrasted against red backgrounds. You can see in them their kinship with embroidery from the vicinity of Tarnopol, where Olga comes from; what is even more surprising is that the artist painted them before she had become familiar with this Ukrainian tradition. Examples of such embroidery also found their way into the exhibition—they are expressive and strong in graphic form and color, militant in expression.

The meeting of lush, stormy images with dynamic embroidery perhaps reflects the liberating power of the meeting of two such seemingly different personalities as Katarzyna Swinarska and Olga Kachurovska, and which resulted in the artistic venture of Innocent Colonies. At this point, at the end of our considerations, we must ask more generally about the possibility of agreement between women of different nationalities, who come from different social strata, which are also in  conflict. The artist praises women’s solidarity beyond the borders of languages, classes, and countries. Establishing such bonds that go beyond fixed traditions, barriers, and conventions requires making a conscious effort. The same happens with the bond presented in Innocent Colonies: it also requires a conscious effort, acting against set rules, and dissenting from the idea that conventions determine our lives for us. 

Translated by Jennifer Zielinska