Innocent Colonies — Video Project 2018/2019

Innocent Colonies/ video-performance

The project “Innocent Colonies” is devoted to a young Ukrainian female immigrant in Poland and was inspired by the story of my 105 years old Polish grandmother who was wet nursed by a Ukrainian 105 years ago and is taken care by a young Ukrainian now. 

The narrative of the multimedia exhibition can be read on many levels. So we first meet a concrete young woman, then we read her story in the context of Ukrainians in Poland. Then we see a story about economic migrants, one you can read from a postcolonial perspective. Finally, too, it’s a story about a woman and a mother who lives closed within four walls, among other women, and whose life is filled with monotonous housework that never ends.

“Since childhood, the topic of colonialism has interested me, especially that of both of the Americas, which evoked strong emotions in me. The appropriation of another people’s lands, living spaces, and bodies in the name of a superior European civilization seemed to me particularly cruel and cynical.

However, the immediate stimulus to start working on the project Innocent Colonies turned out to be a meeting, a meeting with Olga—a young Ukrainian woman who is my grandmother’s caregiver—whose fate, on the one hand, seems to me dramatically opposed to my situation, while on the other, as a woman and a mother, it is so similar.” (excerpt from Without Shame, Andrzej Zagrobelny talks with Katarzyna Swinarska)

Innocent Colonies video, 15’13” with English subtitles: https://youtu.be/mvvU90kAVPo

Artistic grant from the City of Gdansk 2019