WIKTORIA WOJCIECHOWSKA
'Own Place'
Text by Krzysztof Sienkiewicz
«Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.»– writes Robert Frost in his famous poem “The Death of the Hired Man”. The notion of ‘home’ is also the key concept in Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s series entitled ‘Own Place’. Wojciechowska, over a hundred years after Frost’s poem was published, challenges the idea of home in modern times, when distance is no longer a barrier. What does ‘home’ mean for the current generation of young, mobile people?
‘Own Place’ consists of photographs of blurred, pensive faces mixed with pictures of houses at night shown from a distance. There is light switched on inside each one of them. Wojciechowska seems to highlight a connection between these houses and young people of which she took pictures. Are these dwellings the titular own places? Or, perhaps, taking into account the dreamlike atmosphere of the whole series, this is how these young people imagine their own place? The very place, where when you have to go there, invited by the ever-present light, they have to take you in. A place called home.
Yet there may be one more explanation: in our times, when changing one’s place of residence has become more frequent than ever before, the concept of ‘home’ got blurred. Nonetheless, we still long for a place we could call our own. We look for it, we dream about it. The question whether we are still able to find such a place remains open.