Bygone Nearby

How can we make invisible buildings visible again? How can we draw public attention to their history? Photography as a language falls short of making war atrocities visible, yet it enables us to position ourselves in relation to them. It lets us feel and take notice.

In cooperation with Goethe Institut Ukraine, Nadiia Ufimseva and Piotr Przybyla

Bygone Nearby is a collaboration between artist and photographer Jakob Ganslmeier and eight groups of primary school students from Ukraine, Poland and Germany. In the summer of 2020, Ganslmeier conducted week-long workshops in Sumy, Kovel, Beryslaw (UA), Glogówek, Bilgoraj, Warsaw (PL) as well as Marburg and Berlin (DE). A shared history of displacement is what connects these cities.

Photography was used by the students as a reflective tool to investigate their local surroundings. The photographs, essays, interviews and archival research conducted by the groups all point to the devastating effects of WW II which uprooted entire populations and critically changed the towns’ infrastructures.

With major parts of Ukraine under Russian occupation, encouraging youth to engage with their local histories seems more pressing than ever. Only eight months before the Russian army was to occupy her country (significantly affecting the town and cities of Beryslav, Sumy, and Kovel), 16-year-old Kateryna Biruk wrote a fictional letter to ‘Kovelchanka’, one of the buildings visited during the workshop:

“What is more frightening than the horror I am witnessing now? I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than war. There won’t be any victory, because we are all losers. Everybody lost a piece of themselves and can’t live a normal life anymore, one without nightmares about all of that violence, all of those deaths. We are doomed and it’s unbearable. We are a damned generation, born at the wrong time.”

The act of remembering is less of a historical exercise in countries whose borders have shifted numerous times over the past century. The latter is certainly the case for the three countries involved in the project, Poland and Ukraine in particular. For Kateryna and her classmates, the current situation painfully blends in with the past she was addressing in her letter written in the summer of 2021. No doubt, history will not feel like the past to the students from Poland and Germany she met during the workshop either.

Beryslav, Ukraine

UPK Complex (Uchbovo-Profesiyniy Kompleks)

Mass graves in the outskirts Beryslav

project

research

UPK Complex (Uchbovo-Profesiyniy Kompleks)

Mass graves in the outskirts Beryslav

Kovel, Ukraine

Kovelchanka

Mass graves of German soldiers

Sewing factory

House of Culture

Kovel train station

Bakhiv memorial

project

research

Kovelchanka

Mass graves of German soldiers

Sewing factory

House of Culture

Kovel train station

Bakhiv memorial

Read Kateryna Biruk's text out of the perspective of the Kovelchanka building - Kovel, Ukraine

Sumy, Ukraine

Church of Virgin Mary

Kharytonenko’s estate

College of food

project

research

0 FBA7 DE4 1 A02 42 E9 9 C5 A 3 B3 A13 B70 F2 E

Church of Virgin Mary

16299915 2214055208818950 3107796846716605022 o

Kharytonenko’s estate

College of food

Bilograj, Poland

‘Singer House’ and the ‘New’ Synagogue

Sochy

New cemetery

project

research

‘Singer House’ and the ‘New’ Synagogue

Sochy

Warsaw, Poland

Muranow

Umschlagplatz

project

research

Muranow

Umschlagplatz

Impressions of Muranów – Olga Rybałt

Normal place, isn’t it? Some housing blocks, a kindergarten, someone fixing their car on the roadside and someone else opening their kitchen window on the 4^th floor. When you come to a place looking for something specific, you’re often surprised upon seeing how few people see it – even if it seems giant to you. How is it even possible to bear such a burden, you wonder, when it’s so obviously there, in the foundation of your house, both figuratively and literally. It seems the answer is quite easy – one gets used to it. One fills the place with one’s own daily troubles, and instead of thinking how many bones of Shoa victims lie under the road, one thinks of one’s car on the road and why it won’t start. Does it mean the people of Muranów don’t care? No. They remember, in little moments of walking up the staircases or stepping on the marking of the Ghetto wall on their way to work. Nobody ever forgets completely. However, life on the ruins, conscious thereof or not, shows that remarkable human quality of always moving on.