Ewa Held is an architect and painter born in Warsaw, who has lived in France since 1968. The events of March 1968 changed her life, which she had to begin anew in emigration. Her Polish past returned to her through a small blue suitcase:
“In the autumn of 2016, a suitcase was handed over to me – one my parents had left it with their friends before leaving in 1968. This transfer, this time capsule, is a bridge connecting what once was - history per se, as well as my family’s history - with today’s present. It is evidence of, and an awareness of, just how different parameters shape us and how their echo passes through the years and generations.”
The suitcase is made of canvas, blue in colour, measuring 80 cm × 60 cm. Inside are various documents, letters and photographs.
In the series Structures of Connections, I refer to elements associated with the professional life of my father, Józef Majer Held - documents, diplomas, official papers, commemorative photographic albums of construction projects (1949, 1956, 1962) and technical documentation of atomic reactors.
My father was born in 1913 in Drohobycz. In the 1930s, he studied in France, in Grenoble, and returned to Poland in 1947. He was an engineer and, from the post-war period through the 1950s, he performed the construction of high-voltage power lines along major routes across Poland. In the 1960s, he built the first two experimental atomic reactors and the first particle accelerator in Świerk. In 1968, he left Poland and died in Paris in 1988.
The starting point of Structures of Connections are the photographic albums found in the suitcase -black-and-white photographs. They show successive stages in the construction and assembly of electricity pylons and other technical devices. These construction elements emerge against the background of landscapes that are flat, dull, monotonous and unchanging, even though the photographs were taken over twenty years in different parts of the country. The people appearing in these images are anecdotal.
Structures of Connections is a continuation of my earlier series Roads, Looking Without Seeing, and Inner Prison. Through abstract expression, drawing on elements of “landscape”’ I seek to express my visions of the structures and laws that shape reality - both visibly and invisibly. In this series, I try to include the concept of distance - distance in time and distance in space, which both connect and divide.
Referring to the particle accelerator, the present and the past, I use varied formats: the past - formats of 190 cm × 140 cm; the present: 30 × 20 cm; with several intermediate formats in between.
In Structures of Connections, what matters is not only structure, but also its multi-level perception—connections that are artistic, cultural, and based on friendship.”
Recorded by Katarzyna Haber-Pułtorak.
