Abstract
Although the Go Home Polish project was done against the backdrop of specific political events, it is a universal meditation on the theme of home and belonging. It is not a project about Polish émigrés in the UK, although an émigré did make this project. This project is about a person. It is about you.
In 2018, I traveled on foot from Cardiff, where I had lived for 22 years, to Poland, where I was born but was absent for 22 years. I set off instructed to do so by graffiti I saw on a wall which read: Go Home Polish.
I moved not because the graffiti was sprayed on my wall or because I am Polish. I took the graffiti literally for auto-ironic purposes: I feel at home in Wales, but I am also Polish. So should I stay or should I go? Or am I already at home? Who decides which is it: me or the graffiti on the wall?
I decided to find answers to these questions for personal reasons, while at the same time being aware of the weight of the subject I was carrying, of the multitude of the people concerned. The simplest way appeared to be to simply ask others where their home was. I took a map and drew a straight line starting in Cardiff and ending in Świebodzice, I bought a pair of walking shoes and set off to the east: Wales, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. 105 days away from home.
However, it turned out that I never felt more at home than during those 105 days. I detached myself from the local context of Brexit, from the nationalist parades of Warsaw, from the populist newspapers publishing derogatory stories about migrants. The people turned out to be tender. My world was reduced to the dimension of the individual and the only context I had to embrace was the ground under me and the sky overhead. Under the common denominator of you, me and seven trillion humans living on a piece of rock hurtling through a cosmic vacuum. From this perspective, we are all at home. An impermanent, changeable home that does not really belong to anyone.
A symbolic moment of my journey was a story that a journalist named Claudia told me in Cologne. When her mother, Ursula, was a little girl she lived in a village north of Olpe. In 1965, a dam was built there which blocked the waters of the Bigge River and thus created a network of deep lakes. Many villages were submerged as a result of the development and the local population was displaced. Ursula's home disappeared like Atlantis. When she was an old woman, her children took her to the shores of Lake Biggesee for the first time since the resettlement. Without hesitation, Ursula stretched out her hand and, like a compass pointer, pointed to where her home had been standing: “There it was! And there was the mill. There was the road”, she said. Claudia undressed, left her clothes on the shore and swam to the indicated place. She told me that it was an incredible experience, difficult to explain. As she floated above her mother's house, although she was neither able to see it nor enter it, she felt at first in her chest and then in her entire body, something she could only describe in one word: heimat. Home.
Michał Iwanowski
In 2018, I traveled on foot from Cardiff, where I had lived for 22 years, to Poland, where I was born but was absent for 22 years. I set off instructed to do so by graffiti I saw on a wall which read: Go Home Polish.
I moved not because the graffiti was sprayed on my wall or because I am Polish. I took the graffiti literally for auto-ironic purposes: I feel at home in Wales, but I am also Polish. So should I stay or should I go? Or am I already at home? Who decides which is it: me or the graffiti on the wall?
I decided to find answers to these questions for personal reasons, while at the same time being aware of the weight of the subject I was carrying, of the multitude of the people concerned. The simplest way appeared to be to simply ask others where their home was. I took a map and drew a straight line starting in Cardiff and ending in Świebodzice, I bought a pair of walking shoes and set off to the east: Wales, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. 105 days away from home.
However, it turned out that I never felt more at home than during those 105 days. I detached myself from the local context of Brexit, from the nationalist parades of Warsaw, from the populist newspapers publishing derogatory stories about migrants. The people turned out to be tender. My world was reduced to the dimension of the individual and the only context I had to embrace was the ground under me and the sky overhead. Under the common denominator of you, me and seven trillion humans living on a piece of rock hurtling through a cosmic vacuum. From this perspective, we are all at home. An impermanent, changeable home that does not really belong to anyone.
A symbolic moment of my journey was a story that a journalist named Claudia told me in Cologne. When her mother, Ursula, was a little girl she lived in a village north of Olpe. In 1965, a dam was built there which blocked the waters of the Bigge River and thus created a network of deep lakes. Many villages were submerged as a result of the development and the local population was displaced. Ursula's home disappeared like Atlantis. When she was an old woman, her children took her to the shores of Lake Biggesee for the first time since the resettlement. Without hesitation, Ursula stretched out her hand and, like a compass pointer, pointed to where her home had been standing: “There it was! And there was the mill. There was the road”, she said. Claudia undressed, left her clothes on the shore and swam to the indicated place. She told me that it was an incredible experience, difficult to explain. As she floated above her mother's house, although she was neither able to see it nor enter it, she felt at first in her chest and then in her entire body, something she could only describe in one word: heimat. Home.
Michał Iwanowski
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 27 Sept 2022 |