All Works

The context of the W-70 project was the Concrete Legacy exhibition at the CCA in Warsaw in June 2007, which “focused on concrete block housing as one of the gravest consequences of Modernist architectural thought”, and its embodiment in Poland. The W-70 system was the most popular prefabricated multi-storey home system in Poland during the 1970s.

The firststep of the W-70 project consisted in photographying approximately 4000 pictures of different elements of this system, in order to be able to re-assemble them later according to one’s will. Using the photographed prefabricated modules as “raw material”, the second step of the W-70 project consisted in creating visual and spatial situations where the viewer could appreciate the concrete block houses from different perspectives (litterally and metaphotically).

I have indeed been fascinated for long years by concrete block houses and in this project I wanted to convey this fascination, either using some visual properties of perspective (as a reference to the tradition which lead to the Modernist school of architecture), or confronted the viewer with unusual architectural situation. In this way, I tried to achieve pieces that would amuse and intrigue the viewer, and maybe make him look at the modern block houses differently.

Axonometry is a loose set of photographic works whose common denominator is the fact that they all represent reality as an axonometric view. This is an apparent paradox: one sees reality in perspective (and this is what the camera records), and axonometry is a technique representing reality in an abstract, geometric fashion, which by definition contradicts the fundamental rules of perspective. In other words, the expression “axonometric photography” is a contradiction in terms, since photography is always a representation through perspective.

This visual paradox has intrigued me for some time, and I have over the years created several axonometric photographs, most of the times visualisations of buildings (as axonometry is very often used in architectural designs), but also of objects. These images were ether parts of larger projects, or self-sufficient works. The quasi geometric aspect of these photographs, but also the need to build these images literally from scratch, has led me to represent imaginary buildings, legends of the modernist tradition.