"My eyes see in the dark.
I think I'm trying to understand or learn. Un-learn.
I think it has something to do with me. But what I mean is:
It has something to do with you and Poland."
Artist: Natalie Stanczak
Project: My eyes see in the dark
"The series „My eyes see in the dark” is an attempt to cook pierogis for my children. I have forgotten so many things or perhaps never experienced them.
Poland, my family's country. Poland, the country of my past / without pictures. Without words. Without any gentle feeling.
All I remember was that there were grandmas’ pierogis to eat. I have the feeling that the only thing left to me is this food, everything else has been drawn, marked, rewritten by the gaze of others. I have no idea who Poland is. People told me stories about you, but no one let you speak.
My children say it's boring there. They’re right. There's not much there and at the same time I didn't fully understand it. I probably won't either."
"It has something to do with the place, the rooms that remained closed to me. In Germany I was polish and in Poland I was german. I didn't tell myself a story. I always just listened. When I take photographs, my personal silence intertwines with the social reality.
I think it has something to do with the space, the places I started opening up. Through my lens.
This series is an examination of my own family history, but also with the perspective of a society, no, plural: societies that taught me and many other migrant children a form of lack of history. It is a confrontation with having to go, wanting to go, staying and not being able to go back. It has something to do with space, with norms that ate into me like poison.
I think I want to learn to see myself.
I open the front door and run in. I still remember the smell of the hallway when I ran up to my grandparents. This doorknob to turn. The door covered with wooden foil. The window in the bathroom that looks out to the kitchen. A plate of pierogis.
I'm going out.
I think I'm trying to un-learn. To feel: about my blue eyes, my birthmark on the left side of my face, about the time we were there and the place we went. It's no longer dark and my eyes could be brown. Like my daughter's.
I think I should learn how to cook pierogis."
© Natalie Stanczak