I Can Remember It For You - 2025
As a child, growing up in Germany, Canada and then Switzerland, I would spend countless hours looking at the family photo-albums my parents had created since I was born in Cracow, Poland. I would imagine my life’s history flipping the plastic-sheets full of pictures. My parents and relatives would contribute to build this history in my brains, by telling me a few stories here and there.
When we arrived in Canada, my name was in-officially switched from Maciek to Mathieu, so the Québécois people wouldn’t have too much trouble with the pronunciation of this polish name. Yes it was to simplify this aspect of my every day life, so I wouldn’t have to explain where I was from or how to say my name correctly, but it was probably also not to attract any attention on who we really were; refugees from an Eastern European country. I guess my parents learned to keep a low profile because they grew up in a country with communist political leaders. You had to be careful to whom you told the truth, even your neighbor could rat you out.
In fact this is exactly what happened to my grand-pa. His neighbor, a man he said hello to every single day, ratted him out. After this, both my grand-parents ended up in jail for several months.
When I was born, my parents decided to flee the country, that was around 1988. We were lucky to have an aunt in Germany that could « invite us » to spend the holiday at her place. That was the only way we could leave without being harassed by the government. So we packed our bags and left everything behind.
We ended up in refugee camps in Germany. We spent about two and a half years there, sometimes in foster families that would at times treat us like lesser people. Not feed us properly or enough, turning of the heating system, cashing in the state sponsor money for themselves instead. But my parents and other families got tired of this and told the police, so we got moved into double family appartements.
There we could take part in the lottery, but not the regular lottery where you could win a fortune, no not that one. I mean we won a fortune, so to say. We won the right to move to Canada, because of French lessons my dad took twenty years earlier in high school. Among god knows how many families that applied for this, we were the ones allowed to leave those horrible camps.
The only story my mom told me about these camps growing up was that « the Germans would bring us crates and crates of apples full of pesticides », and that she would get sick eating them.
Canada was a great time for me, it’s only latter in life that my parents told me that it wasn’t so fun for them. I was a kid so I was thinking of kid stuff back then, everything was fine for me. My parents had to figure out a new life for them selves, and it wasn’t easy. My dad studied nursery in Canada but his polish high school diploma was not recognized by the State. We had some sort of luck again and my dad found work in Switzerland. So after a few years in Canada, we moved back to Europe.
I remember it being strange, because I was losing all of my friends, things were changing in my mind, I was old enough to understand what was happening to me. We arrived to Switzerland, from a million and a half people city to a four hundred people hole in the middle of nowhere. I saw cows for the first time in my life.
I spoke French, but it was a French other kids didn’t understand, Québécois. I could understand them just fine, but I could feel a gap between them and me.
In Switzerland I started playing around with photography. I would take the family camera and explore this intricate machine.
In my early 20’s, my parents casually told me some stories about the why’s of us leaving my birth-country, Poland. This is when I’ve learnt all those stories, right around 23 years old. Since then I’ve been asking them more and more détails about some of those stories, which sparked the appearance of new anecdotes about those years and there own past, my grand parents and great grand parents past… I started learning a whole lot about my own life’s story.
I’ve always known my history but it was incomplet. It wasn’t falls, I wasn’t lied to but some details of my past have been put aside. And when I discovered them, it felt like I had my « real history » between my hands, so I started to ask people to call me by my real name from there on. Maciek.
I remember feeling a little ashamed telling people my real name up until that point. Fearing they would see me differently, but now I know where this fear comes from. My parents, grand parents, great grand parents were constantly afraid of the people leading their country, and this stuck.
At that point I had already investigated one of my memories in a photographic work titled « If I Could Only Remember », back in 2017, during my photography studies. In it, I questioned the reality of what I consider to be my first memory, which coincided with us leaving the refugee camps in Germany to go to Canada.
Now I’m trying to ask my parents everything I can about the past. But first I have to understand myself, understand how I saw things back then, back in Germany, Canada and Switzerland.
In an exchange of letters and postcards, I ask Maciek about my past, and he asks about his futur. I remember my past, and the past version of myself remembers his past with a clearer image. I forgot some details of his past, but have knowledge of my present. I now need to put the fragments together, to have the whole picture in front of me, so both (hi)stories build one, and create this space of understanding for each other.
In this correspondence of letters between the two fragments of myself; my former-self and me as my present-self, I reflect on the pictures in my family albums, the stories that were told to me when I was a child and later on in life. But I also enable a reflection on this part of History, and try to understand how my memory constructs our individual and collective stories, through family pictures that captured a somehow tragic moment in time. One of those pictures is a photography of my mother and I in, what I didn’t know growing up, were refugee camps in Germany. In this picture, I recognize my mother, but something is off. She looks sick. And one thing that’s always been engraved in my mind is that in this picture, I’m holding an apple, or what I’ve always thought to be an apple. All of these family pictures allowed me to have a different reading of images according to what you know about them.
I don’t want to figure out the truth, that’s not the point of this. I just need to understand that I wasn’t alone in this whole story. History is something shared amongst everybody, and I think that before I got told my life’s history in my twenty’s, I thought that I was building my world alone, on my own. But that’s not how it works.
This apple I thought I was holding in this picture with my mom and I, was just the reflection of my past. Yes it was something else I was holding in reality, but I thought I was holding the apple, that apple my parents had told me about all of those years, since I was a kid.
I grew up with a glimpse of my history and that’s enough. Today I can get deeper into what made my past, the past of my family and the past of my birth-country.
This family story comes out of suppression, the letter form allows me to have a form to tell history in a different way, based on experiences, contradictions. It allows me to question all of this and create a voice that can speak these stories from different approaches. It allows me to question my fragments of memories and find a voice for these fragments to grow.
Exhibition FORMAT - Mont-Soleil - I Can Remember It For You - Opening June 23rd - opened until October 5th 2025
Prize Prix Brigitte Mavromichalis 2025 from the Musée d'art du Valais, June 2025
Exhibition ULTRALIGHT 7000 - I Can Remember It For You - Sierre, Switzerland, June 2025
