EWA & PIOTR – Si vis pacem, para bellum (2008-2015)

In these photographs you can see Ewa and Piotr Sosnowski; they are brother and sister and live together since the death of their father.

Ewa is very well-dressed, as always. Every pullover, t-shirt, shoes, jacket is chosen very neatly; matching, sophisticated, poised. But when you enter her apartment, you leave the normal world and you face another dimension, an inner scenery which is also a state of mind: all is impoverished, decaying, rotten, the smell is unbearable; for years there has been no electricity nor gas nor hot water.

I arrived there at evening and in the dark, I could only hear Miszek barking furiously. After she lit some candles, I caught sight of Piotr's shape wrapped up in the blankets on the sofa. We drank together in this nightmarish place, with Ewa more and more excited; she went on shouting, laughing, singing; the dog jumping, licking, barking, destroying everything possible to destroy. Piotr, drunk and imperturbable on his sofa-bed, smoking one cigarette after another and trying to take part in the conversation in English. A little later I leave their creepy home but the day after I went there again and from that moment on I continued to go regularly. Now we are close and there is much to tell about our relationship; how we learned to know and begin to love each other. Of course, I wanted to take pictures of them and they needed help from me.

Sometimes Ewa doesn't tolerate the bad conditions of the apartment and cleans a little, according to her mood. One day I arrived and there were on the floor hundred of letters, postcards, especially photos. They came out from the furniture, from the drawers, from under the ruined floor. They came out from everywhere. And they were beautiful. Life memories, childhood memories; not ordinary photos. I asked them to let me take these photos and they agreed; I did it because I didn't want them lost or destroyed or very likely, sold separately. I just wanted that they remain together. Most of those pictures were taken by their father Marian Sosnowski who was a very talented amateur photographer. I wanted to give them a united book that they could leaf through whenever they desired. Then I realized that they would have sold it anyway, so I decided to keep it myself.

I have a lot of photos, much more than those collected in the album; I tried to reconstruct their childhood guessing who was who, without consulting them as to the real chronology or the details of their story.

I proposed them to use these old pictures with the new shots I would have done during the years and promised that if I succeeded in doing something good, to pay their debts with the electric company and reconnect the electricity supply. They agreed. But there were other new problems: the ceiling, the floor and the walls are so rotten that reconnection could create the risk of a short circuit and start a fire. Then we solved the problems and they had the electricity supply back.

Since then the apartment was taken away by a real estate agent through a disgusting trick. Ewa was forcedly secluded in a mental institution where she died in 2014. Piotr was transferred in a public hostel where he was suitably looked after. He back to take care of flowers and plants and then he died in 2019. 

Why all this? In order to share a human experience, to not judge, for the unexpected beauty, for the pleasure to find oneself in everything, in order to realize one more time that we don't do anything all by ourselves; for all the things that we don't know and that we cannot talk about.

Ewa and Piotr's family was well-off, then they lost everything. There are many things that led to this situation, but I don't want to spell out too much. I don't want to relate their personal history just through my words or rational interpretations.

Ewa and Piotr know how to laugh and let others laugh, they have culture, elegance and sensitivity. They are far to be perfect. They are not pathetic. They have got what they have got. Life is unique and sometimes is odd. Piotr says it isn't.

Text by Lorenzo Castore