The 23rd Lodz FotoFestiwal will be held until June 23.
This year’s theme, “Letting Go / Liberation”, is explained as follows by the organizers:
Fotofestiwal 2024 emerged from the collective need of freeing ourselves from curatorial boundaries. Used to designing each edition around a theme, this year took the idea of letting go, to encounter a loose approach, paired with multiple readings, without full restriction of a word. Thus, the artists invited to the current edition will present works that take up the challenge of breaking free: free from outdated socio-political structures, offering liberation from traumatic past and inner pressures, as well as from visual contexts and boundaries that seem to limit our perception.
We have selelected 3 exhibitions : Martin Kollar, Peter Pfluger, Michalina Kacperak.
Martin Kollar‘s photo archive touches on the experience of someone dear and loved dying. Here is his text !
AFTER
31th August, 2019 … from that moment the way I look at the world changed. Everything has changed. Maria’s untimely death, her decision to end her own life, is a distinct cut, a sharp delineation of the before and after.
After, as the time slowly passed, I cautiously began to browse through the photographic archive and the scores of material gathered from trips, location scouting and filming together. In the last years we had visited various research centres and scientific institutes, and started to prepare and shoot the film Letopis. It was to be our film.
The excursion into our past life through the archive happened in various stages, lurching from an inability to bring myself to open the files, to obsessive periods in which I could do nothing other than continuously browse through the multitude of images, re-visiting the years, months and days spent together.
Hidden contexts and threads I had not perceived before began to emerge and I started to link them. My aim was not to reconstruct our life but rather saw it as an expression of my desire to capture how the before transcends the after. And how even highly anticipated events always finds you unprepared.
Martin Kollar
Fotofestiwal
June 13-23, 2024
https://fotofestiwal.com/2024/en/
