Irmina Walczak

OAZA: NA NASZYM KWARANTANNOWYM PODWÓRKU

“Oasis: In our quarantine yard” is a series created during 95 days of the confinement of my family in a Spanish countryside, the place we were surprised by the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. It explores the experience of quarantine far from a large city, in the rural area, in which contact with nature brings caress, but tension is enhanced by human absence, both visual and audible. Especially for children, who make the bars, the gate their window to the world. The contact with nature is intensified and a silence, leisure are filled by observing natural events. Simultaneously, the break with reality and its common rhythm makes the imagination flourish. With the sunset, the restlessness and fear of death awaken. We all learn how to tame these monsters of the night and wake up light enough to appreciate the growth of our temporary vegetable garden. Through this work I aim to make visible an experience of going through.

Irmina Walczak is Polish, graduated in Latin America Cultural Studies by Warsaw University and PhD in Social Sciences by University of Brasilia. During years, she had worked as a researcher in cultural politics evaluation using ethnography and visual anthropology as an approach. In 2011, she turned her interest into photography itself and started exploring family relationships, intimacy and daily life aspects. She frequently works with her life partner Sávio Freire. They study and successively deepen the condition of the child in contemporary society and its corporeality. They developed together a body of work about childhood free of technology and close to the nature which was published in 2016 in Brazil under the name “Retratos pra Yayá”. Simultaneously, Irmina creates representations of herself as a mother and reflects about how motherhood is inscribed in the female body and how it shapes mother’s identity. She was the finalist of the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography (Israel 2020) and the LensCulture Portrait Award (USA 2016) and the winner of the Head On Portrait Prize (Australia 2018) and second place of the Revela-t 2021 (Spain, 2021).