Artist
Katarzyna Wąsowska
Katarzyna Wąsowska is a photographer and book artist based in Poznań, Poland. Her art practice juggle between subjective, unreal creation photography and documentary. Referring to scientifical and parascientifical literature, researching the archives or interviews she tries to construct stories about specific places or certain communities, far from the facts but reliable historically.
In her works she often focuses on issues connected with migration or its destiny. She is mostly interested in the problematic of constructing identity and how people define themselves and the land of their origins. Recently she is involved in collective photographic research about polish migration to South America. It happens that she gets out of the material world and enters other dimensions of perceiving the world, exploring the paranormal events and believes not connected with any religious system. Finds collective creation as the best way for making photography as permanent process of putting individual thoughts in doubts.
She was born in 1990 by the Polish seaside in Gdańsk. Graduated in Photography on Academy of Arts in Poznań. She is also part of Ostrøv publishing collective.
Waiting for the snow
This work takes it roots in very specific phenomenon of polish migration to South America, in the time of Poland's partitions. We focus on Brazilian and Argentinian cases, the biggest destination points, which for sure at that time were perceived by migrants as very unknown and exotic.
We are highlighting this side of European colonization in America which is hardly known, because it had totally different nature than others. In central Europe, colonization has been run as a proper advertisement campaign, which purpose was to colonize areas in order to take a benefit out of them, pretending they were not habitated. In Brazilian case, purpose was also to find workers to replace slaves after abolition and to fulfill governments plan of making Brazil white. In Argentina, the plan was mostly based on the idea that only European workers could properly work on building the dreamt modern society.
This migration politics strongly influenced the way migrants could define themselves and build a relationship with new land, which is specially important since most of them were farmers. Polish descendants nowadays (after around 100/150 years) are still actively cultivating their ancestors traditions and language.
By using our own photographs, archival documents and family albums, we wish to create multilayered visual story. On one hand we work collecting tellings from the collective memory about the country of origin and the beginnings of settlements in a new homeland. On another hand, we focus on creolization and mix of cultures, observing how the slavonic background got sincretized with South-American context, creating a notion of identity which placed between reconstruction, fiction and fantasy.
*Made together with Marianne Wasowska