A story about my partner’s family home in Slovakia; a story about the relationship with past and present. The environment once so familiar to Zuzana, which she is still lucky to enjoy, will be lost forever once her grandparents are gone. I decided to immortalize this vanishing world in the photographs. Sometimes items we surround ourselves with, and places we live in, can tell a lot about us and where we come from, sometimes as much as our own words. For Zuzana and I, the migrants who no longer live in Central Europe, those once ordinary and familiar places have become extraordinary, sometimes even surprising. Symbols have become decorations. Photography immortalizes. "Domov" means "Home" in Slovak and it is my gift to Zuzana and her family. Family photographs - a family treasure to be kept. "Domov" is ongoing series started in 2012 and continued on every home coming visit to Horna Streda and Detva where Zuzana's family lives.
Click on thumbnail to enlarge the image.
“Among the outmoded “truths” identity raises most questions now. Even photographers themselves are uncertain of their identity, especially those born in Eastern Europe. (...) Polish photographer Blazej Marczak lives in Scotland and goes with his partner to her birthplace in Slovakia. They find an environment, which has become exotic even there; it is a vanishing way of life, and its juice survives only in things; a traditional wedding portrait on the wall, the painting of Virgin Mary, dear landscapes, the Heart of Jesus, the radio, the crucifix... Contemporary Europeans sitting on both sides of the double bed read English books alien to this place (about Latin America and “Brave New World by Aldous Huxley), and teh lamps outshine the halo of Jesus praying on the Mount of Olives, which makes a comical trinity. The couple’s facial expressions demonstrate their detachment from the “speech” of things around them: both about Christian ideals and the spirit of the specific town, which, for some unknown reason, always survives best in the patterns of wallpaper, floral ornaments of clothes and shapes of the sofas. The reincarnation is impossible to name: the feeling of familiarity pierces the viewer’s heart and only its intensified beat can tell the difference between what is Slovak or Polish or Balkan or Romanian or Ukrainian or Lithuanian (...) The jab is painful, for, as Marczak writes, when these grandparents die, this environment and everyday life in it will disappear. Even now, contemporary “new things” stick out among the “true” things- they are soulless and the same for everyone: a CD, a gas stove, a Coca Cola bottle or an Apple computer. Old rituals look like simulacra of the past among them. (...)”