Project
2015 - honourable mention
Organiser
"Remembrance and Future" Foundation
Location
vicinity of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw
Design team
Michał Adamczyk, Piotr Musiałowski, Paulina Pankiewicz
Cooperation
Krzysztof Nowotka
Associations, which we devoted this work to, pertain to the rescue understood as an offering of a shelter. In this competition work, a crevice becomes the ideological equivalent of a shelter. It is depicted as a long and narrow fissure found in the space adjacent to the Museum.
On the literal level it is an interpretation of shelters, hiding places spontaneously arranged during the German occupation, a place giving a hint of safety and the hope of survival. On the symbolic level it is a crack - "a fissure in the reality", which claimed the entire rich world of the Jewish nation.
The experience's scenario
First of all the spectator is introduced to the crevice. Discovers the elongated crack which, through the illusion caused by the use of mirrors on one of the walls, intensifies the impression of a space hidden underground.
It is the ideological equivalent of a shelter in which we more feel - rather than see - somebody's presence through the observation of movement, light, shadows, fragmentary reflections of the users, obtained through the use of curvature-changing surfaces of mirrors and light placed under the floor.
The next step is the culmination of the experience. In the highest and narrowest point the surface's geometry becomes vertical. For the first time we are presented with a full, undistorted image.
We see ourselves. In the context of our 'journey', the confrontation with our own reflection is an experience which grants us the meeting with the earlier only somewhat perceptible presence.
We are faced with a meeting between the rescuer and the survivor. It turns out that they are the same person.
