No Love in the House of Concrete
The project is rooted in a personal connection to Warsaw, the city of my birth. Growing up in the suburbs, I always returned to the city in memory, where the gray blocks of concrete rise relentlessly into the sky. These buildings are not just architecture; they are landscapes of memory, shaping both the city and the self. The fragile surfaces of the blocks, their scars and imperfections, act as traces of absence, decay, and transformation, and reveal what I call the “sick spine” of the city.
Photography in this project is not simply a tool of representation. It becomes a space of passage, a way to make visible the invisible, to trace the structures that lie beneath the surface. Models are constructed from simple materials, photographed, and transformed through painterly interventions, allowing the image to emerge between perception and imagination, memory and invention. Layers of paint, glue, and manipulated photographic surfaces mirror the layers of insulation, repairs, and decay present on the buildings themselves.
The work is informed by the psychoanalytic reflections of Andrzej Leder on Warsaw’s post-traumatic history and Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas on impermanence and fragility in modern life. Through this lens, the project examines how the city’s concrete structures carry collective memory, silently witnessing social and historical forces while continuing to exist in their understated way. No Love in the House of Concrete seeks to give form to these traces, to allow the hidden life of the city to surface and be felt. It is an attempt to understand, to reflect, and perhaps to love the city in its ambiguity, fragility, and endurance.