Artist
Patrycja Wojtas
Patrycja Wojtas (b. 1990) is a photographer, visual artist. Graduated from the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theathre in Łódź (diploma in Photography). She got the Ministry of Culture scholarship in 2017, within which she carried out the cycle Kruszywo/Debris, as well as a project of her photobook. She cooperated with the Archeology of Photography Foundation, e.g. preparing publications Emulsja and LUX, as well as during archival and research queries. She presented her works during group and individual exhibitions, among others, within the activity of the curatorial collective Lajt in Szczecin (Cache, 2017) and the TIFFFestival in Wrocław (Debris, 2018). She participated in FOMU Photobook Workshop in Antwerp and published her works in such magazines as Der Greif, Yet Magazine, FotoRoom, Zwykłe Życie.
Her art practice focuses on the relationship between the human being and the landscape. She tracks the history of the ways of space use, of the actions and transformations that leave a series of dispersed marks behind. Including archival materials in her practice, she reveals the changeability of the space in time and constructs a visual essay about memory.
Kruszywo (Debris)
The space of "the second nature", understood as something naturally transformed to such extend soas to create a new ecosystem, became for her a starting point to create a photographic cycle called Kruszywo (Debris). This project presents the phenomenon of the constant transformation of the earth. She observes this process at numerous stages, not only from the perspective of the people, but also from the perspective of objects, as well as the one of nature itself, nature withdrawing from industrialisation or ousting the industry. While working on Kruszywo/ Debris, the artist visited almost 20 former localities, places where there used to be villages and towns that had disappeared as a result of industrial transformations and the degradation of the environment. The title of this project refers to the material which is excavated in many of these places, crumbled rock, visual binder between various spaces and stories strongly unified by the transformation. Within the frame work of the Kruszywo/Debris she also includes a parallel archival narration using the documents of the social life, private photos, library materials. The material obtained from this process inscribes, on the one hand, in the photographic tradition of critical topography tracking visual influence that people have on the landscape, and, on the other hand, it places itself somewhere in the space of a subjective document reaching for an image and experience of common people, together with their micro history and their memory activated by the archival set of images.