Tomasz Szerszeń “Architecture of Survival”,  2017 / 2019, photography

The photographic series Architecture of Survival by Tomasz Szerszeń is devoted to the ephemeral architecture that the artist, photographer, anthropologist and writer discovered on the Greek island of Samothrace. Temporary shelters made of stones, sticks and old blankets, are built by city dwellers who come here to rest from civilisation, try a different life, or just simply to spend some time by themselves.

As Szerszeń says: “This space, which limits movements to basic gestures of survival, is also a good vantage point from which the tectonics of contemporary crises—economic, refugee, ecological—become clearly visible.”

Samothrace was a sacred island in antiquity. In the twentieth century, after the Greek Civil War, it became a place to which opponents of the regime were exiled. Today it is a border of Europe, its bridgehead in the Aegean Sea and an everyday witness to the refugees’ often tragic fate.

The photographs in the Galeria Studio collection are part of a series that includes several dozen black-and-white photograms and was shown in our exhibition “Transfert” in 2019.

Tomasz Szerszeń is a photographer, anthropologist, writer and author of exhibitions. Memory, history and displacement are recurrent motifs in his literary as well as visual oeuvre.

Dorota Jarecka