A rooster is crowing
Swallows circle outside
The sugar bowl with the broken handles
Some salt grains have fallen out
A fly is trapped in the room
The sound of a horse-drawn cart getting fainter
A box filled with spools of thread and beads
The globe no longer shows the correct names
The sound of crockery
A black and white TV test pattern and tone
Pre-war photos in the album
A burgundy layer of paint underneath
The smell of apricot marmalade
A siren wails far away
Rotting apples in a basket
A train horn in the distance
Two clocks ticking
The dog barking
The sound of a spoon stirring tea
Cigarette smoke seeps into the tablecloth
A June breeze sweeps through the window
A green moth rests on the wall
A few fruit flies linger
A dead fly on the window sill
Her series of 100 photographs depicts details of the interior of her grandmother’s house in Poland and explores her childhood experience there in the 80s, documenting a world that has long disappeared and only exists in the ever-shifting space of memory. For Rafalski, the house was a place where time flowed differently: it was an analogue world with its own set of rules.
When she recently returned there to take these photographs, memories of that other world surface there - and she finds herself neither in the past nor the present, but in a space of limbo. Over the years she has inhabited the house more in her memory than in actuality. Through the process of memory, the house keeps growing over time, transforming into a familiar yet strange place.
The photographs in this series explore loss, transience and an ever-shifting memory. That era is gone, the events and people are gone, and the mind remembering is no longer the same mind. Memory persists, though it shifts and morphs, constantly in process.
This series can be seen as a portrait of her grandmother as well as a landscape of a domestic space. Fragments of the interior which her grandmother once inhabited still hold traces of her presence: cushion covers she sewed, curtains she hung, objects she collected.
Each shot incorporates a paper viewfinder that frames a fragment of the interior, the site of a memory for Rafalski. This abstract ‘periphery’ creates a pictorial layer of distance to the depicted objects. The titles refer to objects or sensations not visible in the photographs. They prompt the viewer to imagine them, creating another layer to the image.
All photographs: 80x53cm, C-type print, Edition of 5, 2025
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