Soft Spot

I come from a small town in southern Poland. I am the oldest of four sisters, the youngest of which was born when I was 16. Since then I have been fascinated by her imagination, courage, and self-acceptance. I cannot remember the exact moment when I lost these traits, yet I am sure I was already lacking in them when I was her age. Soft Spot is a story about my sister’s childhood years, years that she is currently in; it is also the story about myself. We are the daughters of an alcoholic.

Our childhood has been a constant struggle with loneliness, destabilisation, lack of closeness, and an everlasting sense of guilt. A dysfunctional home is a place full of contradictions. You feel a strong tie with it, which limits your actions later in life. When you leave, it is still inside you. When you come back, you dream about running away. But you can’t when you are 11.

A safe place for a child is often their imagination. For my sister, her own room is her whole world. It has everything―from the good things to the bad ones. Pleasant and painful. She has cast a spell on it. The walls are covered with the drawings she has been creating, up as far as her hands can reach. Nothing here is fake. There are some places where fantasy and having fun serve as a form of survival, charming the reality, sketching in what is absent.

Soft Spot is a set of photographs based on the room of my youngest sister. The project combines both the pictures that document the room itself, as well as the images of my own compositions, whilst also incorporating portraits of my family. It is a story about leaving a place which is both your only shelter and your prison at the same time. I am observing and documenting a certain phase in life in which a girl stops being a child.

Soon the walls will be painted over, yet all of the lines and the marks will be remembered forever.

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