The exhibition is a part of the Programme of the Artistic Residence of the Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz

With the help of blue – interview with Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz

Danuta Milewska: You approach the city as if it were a Being who has a soul and spirit in addition to a body. The title of your project Please tell me, city is a kind of request and a kind of making of intimate contact, and also such a commitment in openness and readiness to what it is like, to the stories of the city, to what it has in itself. How did Bydgoszcz talk to you in relation to building your exhibition?
Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz: I was visiting Bydgoszcz for the first time and wanted the city to teach me something about itself. I started with an initial familiarisation with its multiculturalism and my particular attention was drawn to the history of Fordon. As I am close to the theme of cultural borderlands, I was interested from the outset in the multicultural diffusion present here, the traces of which can still be seen today, for example, in the architecture and local micro-histories. I started with a leisurely stroll around Fordon and had an interesting conversation with Damian Rączka from the Fordon Lovers’ Association, who showed me around the district and told me its history. With this initial insight, I decided that the project would focus specifically on the women’s prison and the herstories hidden within its walls.
In the exhibition, we have archival elements that you give a completely new form to – you bring them to life with your voice (recordings) and optionally give them to the public to touch. Where did this idea to work with the archive come from?
In the State Archives, where I carried out a preliminary survey on the prison, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of files documenting women’s sentences from different periods of Polish statehood and also World War II. They obviously use a cold and official language of description that deprives the stories they contain of a human dimension, dehumanises the prisoners and completely subordinates them to the system. It also shows social inequalities, such as the predominance of the poorest women among prison inmates or the majority of positions being taken by men. I searched for what was hidden between these lines and what could only resound if I put them into spoken form and interpreted them with my voice.
Voice is a storytelling tool. In order to know anything about the past you first have to imagine it. I was able to assemble the story of the prisoners from scraps of these stories, which had to be added with sensitivity and an awareness of the historical context and its contemporary relevance.
In Fordon, women were incarcerated for a wide variety of crimes, including murder, theft, sometimes also crimes that are incomprehensible to us today – such as ‘bribery’ or ‘vagrancy.’ Each of these cases would require a separate analysis. Through reading the files, I would like to embrace the stories of these socially excluded women with my affection and understanding.
In my project, however, I focused on the political aspect of punishable abortion in the interwar period, which of course also has a contemporary dimension. The exhibition is located near the Women’s Rights Square, and following the tightening of legislation in this area in Poland after 2016, this issue has remained unchanged to this day. By interpreting the information found in the files on this subject, I wanted to look at the complexity of this issue against populist slogans and see the impact that such a tightened law has had and can have on women’s livelihoods, especially those of the poorest.
Photos of the Fordon walk are also an important part of your work in Bydgoszcz. In your productions, you often talk about places and non-places of memory. What are some of the locations in your photographs that you further highlight in the exhibition?
On display in the exhibition is the so-called Gliders’ Mountain, which is counter intuitively linked to the theme of women’s rights. Not everyone knows it, but it is the place where trials of those accused of witchcraft were held in the past, for which women were usually punished by burning. The site is nowadays associated with the former Fordon airport. On display is a photograph from my walk near the hill and a fragment of an archive photograph, showing the same place from different perspectives. The hill was spotlit with blue light.
In the audio work, I read a selection of prisoners’ files, among which midwives received the longest sentences. In this story, they are the ones who play the role of the ‘witches,’ who had to suffer a heavy punishment for making use of their forbidden knowledge. Often their activities involved the risk of imprisonment, but were driven by empathy towards the women who sought their help. We are talking about a time when abortion was punished without regard to, for example, extreme poverty, pregnancy as a result of rape or a risk to the woman’s health. Surprisingly, in modern Poland, we are still faced with one of the most stringent laws in this area.
What importance do you attach to light in your works?
Light, especially the colour blue, runs through my work in various forms. It is a vehicle for spirituality. At the exhibition in Bydgoszcz, I use it to create a sphere of the sacred in which herstories resound. This blue aura helps to focus, but also to work through difficult issues, which are still a controversial topic in Poland.
You have also returned to collage forms here. What do these Bydgoszcz collages mean to you as a researcher of community memory?
Collage is a technique that has been with me for a long time. In my earliest works, I often used black and white photographs found at antique fairs, from which I created a series of collages titled “Bad Fairy Tales” (2013-2018). On the one hand, by transforming archival material such as the photograph, I strip it of its documentary character. On the other hand, I give them a metaphysical expression, in which the stories of the female prisoners interconnect, intermingle and transcend the moment the shutter button is pressed. They are an attempt to touch and see anew the faces, gestures or relationships between the characters. Through the spontaneity of the collage technique, it is possible to see these situations intuitively, so that the results of working with this technique can sometimes be surprising.
How do these Fordon herstories fit into your dissertation research? What place do they occupy among the other stories you are researching?
My doctoral thesis is on the history of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland and is entitled Herstory in Many Voices. I tell the story through multiple media, including the use of fabric and voice, which are particularly associated with the female narrative. Studying the files of the Fordon women prisoners gave me the opportunity to gain an insight into the situation of women at different periods in Poland from a different perspective than before. The Fordon penitentiary was one of the strictest of its kind in Poland and from its inception until the 1980s was exclusively for women. During the German occupation, mainly Polish and Jewish women were sent here. I also found documents of female prisoners from the south-eastern areas of the Second Republic, from villages located in the region I am researching. Thanks to this research, I was able to look at how and for what these women were punished, which obviously has political overtones. Among the documents collected in the folders were also letters, postcards and information about the material situation of the prisoners. All this has given me the opportunity to look at these herstories afresh.

Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz
Please tell me, city
03.12.2024 – 04.01.2025
the exhibition is a part of the Programme of the Artistic Residence of the Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz
curator of the residence: Danuta Milewska
The project will be part of the artist’s doctoral thesis Herstory in many voices at the Doctoral School of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.