Marianne Wasowska

duo with Katarzyna Wasowska

This project tells the story of Polish migration to South America, with a particular focus on Brazil and Argentina, which were the main points of destination. It merged from the desire to shed light on a little-known aspect of the colonization of the Americas: in Central Europe, the conquest of these new lands was the subject of veritable advertising campaigns that touted the «colonial adventure» as a means of upward social mobility, aimed at the most deprived populations, peasants and workers who had been relieved by successive wars. Their descendants tell the story of how, when they arrived, they set to work preparing for winter, without knowing that it would never arrive.

Our central issue concerns the identity dynamics that run through these communities, mainly peasants, in these new lands. The brutality of the contrast between their extremely cold place of origin and the subtropical jungle where they settled, seems to us ideal for highlighting the idea of identity as a construction. 

A process which, after multiple historical hibridations and fragmentations, is increasingly approaching fiction.

We work with historical and anthropological documents, maps and archival images, but also use oral transmission as raw material. We construct photographs from selected fragments extracted from this collective memory, producing a collaborative and poetic form of documentary, composed from the fragile material of the imaginary.

Inkjet prints, lightboxes, wall papers, original documents and archive photographs