It might be Wisia, the way she stands, the same age 86, 87, but she'd probably have on carpet slippers, or cut-out sneakers, not shoes always too tight on her swollen feet, and not a cardigan either, not with the belt; always too hot even in the middle of February even when the winter frosts turn your fingers blue and the magnolia branches crackle under the heavy snow, ("leave a window open at night to let the cold moon take shelter", she told us), but the same faded dress she made for herself, her second skin, blue, rust and ocher paisley wool, dark blue, well filled in around the waist, head to one side, hand on hip, looking straight back in your eye just barely bearable her eye between childish devilment and that ancient instinct to serve and protect, the eye, the instant of pure outward introspective receptivity,

the inner glowing of her space

might be late winter, probably actually spring, but feels more like late winter, the last snow drift piling up on the bed of sleeping primroses, innocence and cruelty, in the second photograph her body tucked in under a thick blanket.

the spaces between us

spaces speaking of the things unknown that bring out patterns in her life, in our lives.

(... my wojtek, though I also know Wojtek Skowronek, is a completely different guy, an anonymous Mr. No/one. the secret goal of this project is to emphasize and to distinguish the undistiguished ones, to bring them into light. wojtek is a friend of mine from the early childhood. an astro-physicist. a base player of our trashmetal bands and a complete nut-case...)

and the images of the woman, the images of the old woman, the image of our grandmothers, our mothers, the images of people between us, gone on their way, gone through us...

(... the thread is all tangled up in a maze of narrative plots, mysteries, around too many places and people. nothing makes sense. everything makes sense. spins. everything is possible. made out of chaos the map of scattered and seemingly unrelated elements can be read differently by each viewer. the stories begin to tell themselves, my grandpa plays clarinet in New Orleans; i will not explain...)

Cultivating lies like the images in dreams, we deal with things first by running away from things, their voices, ticking clocks, letters from lost friends put away in old shoe-boxes, locked in the basements, train-lines taking us away from here to an unknown there… then by inventing their duplicates, their “combed shadows” that wear the reality like a mask and through that mask scope out the deeper message. Distorting, magnifying, or else shrinking and putting invisible wings on tiniest detail. We recognize ourselves less in simple facts of our lives than in the small but dazzling mythologies of which we now are the heroes. Storytellers. "...somebody, anybody, everybody, nobody..." Dreamed among other figures. In Luxembourg Gardens, in Drohobycz, in the lush swamps of Louisiana. So that in our hearts we can listen to the clocks go on ticking in the kitchen, read letters we could’ve written in reply to those locked in dusty yellow boxes, and hop on the train that would take us back to our departure point where we could recover the trees and the rivers of our childhood. Storytellers.

who can really tell by now? -

did these things really happen to them or were they only a bunch of puppets that reify both surreality and the "reality" of memory, trapped in each story told, each photograph, trapped in different color rooms, and trapped in time and by memory. elementary school scenes, smoky cafes and outskirts of towns, dirty boulevards, music intruments, violins, double-basses, clarinets, tangos & jazz, insects and burdock leaves, deep summer grass - who can tell?

But the tales themselves are as fresh as if it all happened yesterday, as if the scraps of memories could never fail to entwine the complicit listener in the impossible chiasm between the invented and the real.

(... for me, they simply are utterly real. a topography of the town will be very important, the map of the place but also some trivia, maybe a couple of funny stories a la mike tyson boxing in a sweaty dark gym around the corner. i made a few really great portraits in Catskill but i will need more - can you take some digital photos of the guys? simple JPGs will do.)

Like a host who is waiting for his uninvited guest the storyteller sets the tablecloth, arranges the flowers, makes sure there is a glass of wine for everybody. He constructs a physical and conceptual labyrinth, a pre-narrative inner world of spatiality, on the edge of dream-like imagery and an everyday familiar experience.

(... I imagine building a mental shell - a resonance cage for the video projections: a through filled with earth stretching across the entire room...maybe I’ll have three versions, from muddy to cracked and desert dry... one of my wacko friend will dance inside the pool....
....the video image plus the sensual qualities: sounds, textures, even, if possible, smells...)

*

(... I must write now, gather the information to produce more elements for this great jigsaw puzzle...)