Time Capsules, Predicting the Apocalypse, and Being Nosy: A Conversation with Błażej Marczak
Błażej (pronounced Bwagey) has lived in Ottawa since 2016. He followed his Slovakian-born partner Zuzana here from Scotland, where he had lived for eleven years after leaving his homeland: Poland. His art, which largely focuses on forms of change – social, environmental, and personal – is nourished by hours spent reading books reflecting his interest in sociology, architecture, and history — especially the history of human thought in the modern and Postmodern period, and wandering the streets of cities where he has lived.
I had the delight of speaking to Błażej during his first ever Zoom call (how he made it until Summer 2021 before being initiated to the platform baffles me!). During our call, we discussed his magnificent series Domov, in which he captures the intimate environment of the homes of Zuzana’s parents and grandparents in Slovakia, as well as his recent Ottawa series.
Marczak’s guiding principle is “subject matter over the idolization of the medium.” His work is about cities, people, and time – not about photography. He uses his camera as a tool, just as a sculptor uses clay, a painter uses a brush, and a cook uses a whisk. “I don’t think I ever met a painter or read an article about a painting that focuses on the brush,” he says. He photographs in digital thanks to its affordability compared to film, a testament to the accessibility of modern-day photography. “I think what’s most important is what you’re showing. Technique is important, but in photography, there is a tendency to fetishize film and gear.”
Domov
In Domov, Marczak ponders our relationship to time and objects by entering what he defines as “time capsules” of Catholic regalia: FM radios, old wedding pictures, corded telephones, and (extremely cool) vibrant wallpapers. The photographs are explosively colourful, a quality that Marczak was especially sensitive to after living in Aberdeen, Scotland, which he describes as “a very grey city made from granite, with lots of rain” that makes Slovakia feel like “a world of colour.” To a Gen-Z Ottawan viewer such as myself, these images feel surreal, as if curated by a vintage-loving set designer for a Wes Anderson film. To Marczak, they represent his experience as a diasporic artist. Domov, in Slovak, means home. The title captures Marczak’s simultaneous feelings of identification and exteriority as someone who’s lived in many countries, and who found himself in one that shares many elements with Poland.
When Marczak captured these stills during a holiday in his partner’s homeland, he felt a tension between the decor, language, food, and other elements that resemble where he grew up, and the subtle differences in “artifacts of everyday life” and in religiosity that made him feel like an outsider, both as a Pole and as someone acclimated to Scottish culture. “Coming from the UK and living outside Poland and Slovakia, I thought, oh! I didn’t know people were still so religious! You know these things and they’re part of you, but after living so many years abroad, they become exotic. It’s nice to look at your own culture with a fresh eye.”
“[Domov] was partly about me,” he explains. It allowed him to explore how cultures change at different paces depending on context. “These things in Slovakia in Zuzana’s family somehow disappeared faster in my family. I had the opportunity to do something I would have liked to do with my own family.” Exploring cultural changes through intimate spaces echoes Marczak’s beliefs about identity, an outlook influenced by the thoughts of Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist and philosopher of liquid modernity. “Just like the world is constantly changing, shaped and reshaped, identity is fluid, liquid, something that is constantly flowing and changing,” Marczak explains. “Especially when you move around, something is constantly added.” Even his own moral compass and relationship to this theory, he jokingly recognizes, “change as [he] moves.”
This was my first exposure to the concept of liquid modernity, so I am as new to it as you probably are. It is defined as contemporary society’s tendency towards ambiguity, in contrast to prior, more rigid and organized eras. Our relationships, whether professional, economic, amicable, romantic, or sexual, are particularly affected. We fluctuate based on what is convenient, pleasurable, or profitable, making the world less reliable, relationships more fragile, and happiness fleeting. Change seems to be the keyword here, which motivates Marczak to capture the world around him before change modifies cultures and landscapes, and to capture change as it occurs. In this way, Marczak acts as a historian, reflecting his view that “photography was made for preserving, for freezing reality.” In Domov, this sense of preservation comes through as Marczak captures older generations before they disappear. “Some of the things I photographed don’t exist anymore – one grandmother passed away, then a grandfather. Only one grandmother is still alive. I like capturing places, feelings, and things that are in transformation.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Marczak skirts nostalgia at all costs. “That’s definitely something I try to avoid; I try to focus on the present.” But it seems he can’t escape it entirely. Childhood memories and intimate, unfiltered family settings such as those presented in Domov feel entwined with nostalgia, particularly when thinking of one’s own family. “These places were like time capsules, so you can’t avoid nostalgia. I dread that visual code, but I see it in some of my images. I’m not trying to make my images nostalgic, but when I have this feeling and there is something which may disappear, like historic buildings or areas, I do photograph them and they naturally suggest nostalgia. I don’t take them with nostalgia in mind; I take them because they’re part of the city fabric.”
To clarify, he mentions his experience coming across the Medical Arts building at 180 Metcalfe Street, a 1928 building designed by famous Ottawa architect W.E. Noffke. When he saw it prior to its renovation, he was taken off guard. “When I saw this building, I felt transformed in time, and I felt nostalgic, which is weird for me. It was nostalgia for something which I never experienced, because I wasn’t there in the twenties. I didn’t know this reality. I think there is a term for this feeling [which is funnily associated with romanticism Marczak later pointed out] – sehnsucht – a nostalgia for the unknown.”
Marczak admits that his childhood has a tangible effect on his work, for instance on his interest in shooting apartment blocks reminiscent of Polish cities. “It took me time to realize that my upbringing, my own experiences, were driving my work. There’s no escape from yourself. For a long time, I had this approach that you have to detach yourself from the picture, have this cold look, and be the observer, but I end up being driven by my own experiences anyway.” Resigning himself to the impact of his experiences on his work has allowed Marczak to explore more personal themes than in earlier works, such as The Grey City series, though remaining in a distinct documentary style and intention. In fact, he appears only in two photographs. These images are of himself and Zuzana in bed, a fun and playful element he humorously chose to add in response to the traditional Catholic décor that welcomed him as he first stepped in the guest bedroom of Zuzana’s grandmother’s house. “It wasn’t pre-planned. It was one of my first times going to Slovakia and I went to the bedroom at her grandma’s and I thought, I have to photograph this. I find the contrast between myself, Zuzana, and the cross funny, since we are not religious at all. But I don’t see a problem in playing with these symbols, because I was subjected to them as part of my education. I rejected them, but they’re part of my identity. So the photographs are staged, but not artificial or fake – they do reflect us.” Much like he is interested in “transformative qualities that transform the city, the landscape,” his interest in forms of change takes on a personal quality in these images, reflecting a shift in values experienced by many younger generations. He associates these qualities to “the liquid state of reality that is constantly changing.”
Perhaps unknowingly, Marczak captures moments and landscapes that will seem foreign to us in 25 or 50 years if our ways of interacting with each-other and the world, including the natural and human world, continue to change at such a rapid pace.
Ottawa
I couldn’t resist asking Marczak to speak about his Ottawa series, which is so relevant to Nosy Mag’s mission. Marczak’s practice challenges stereotypes that certain cities are boring, a trope so often told by those who fail to explore the curiosities hidden away from popular spots. “People still don’t appreciate the places where they live. I’ve noticed, in every city where I’ve lived, a tendency to down talk it. It’s the same in Aberdeen, in Edinburgh, and so on.”
As a result, Marczak’s approach is characterized by curiosity, humility, and openness to discovering little-frequented spaces and meeting people who surprise and defy conventional expectations. Perusing his photos, even a lifelong local may find areas they don’t recognize, because the photos are of an area of Ottawa they never saw a reason to go to. Marczak recounted, for instance, the story of a woman well into her 50s who had lived in Ottawa her whole life, and who, upon seeing his urban landscapes of Vanier, confided she had never been there.
There is a lesson to be drawn here, and Marczak says himself that his goal is to “show local people from Ottawa or not only the areas that officials like people to see. I’m not going around looking for a postcard,” he says. “There are other areas, areas to which many people will not even go, or think they’re dangerous. But they’re not; they’ve just been neglected in many instances.” So, Marczak opts to explore by riding his early 90s Miyata MTB bike (which he is gradually turning into an all-season “photo-carrier machine!”), hopping on a bus, or going for a long walk and seeing where his camera takes him. “I love cities, I love investigating how cities develop, why something is like it is. I go around the place being nosy, basically, and going into places where I normally wouldn’t go. That way, you can become a part of the place much faster than if you just go between work, home, and shopping.”
These new ideas of belonging to a city through discovering its nooks and crannies, and showing its ugly side as beautiful do not fully replace Marczak’s previous intentions. Much like in Domov, he is interested in capturing Ottawa’s landscape, people, and climate at this present moment to reflect his anxieties about the direction the world is taking. His interest in preserving the present before it dwindles away is illustrated in his winter landscapes of Ottawa, which take on a personal narrative once his own memories are considered. “I remember similar winters in Poland from my childhood, but they disappeared. You don’t see such winters anymore. I thought, maybe I should hurry up and document them here, because maybe they will disappear here as well.”
Most of the Ottawa photographs are of empty streets and anonymous buildings, sometimes with a cheeky brand name hidden in plain sight, pointing out some irony (“Fresh Groceries” in Snowstorm; Jolliet Ave #1, above, feels particularly humorous to me). When asked why people in his photographs have disappeared over time, replaced by urban landscapes, Marczak starts with a quick but understandable jab at North American car culture (“I think I know why it is. I think it’s because there are so many people sitting in their cars. Some areas are just ghost zones after office hours due to an outdated urban planning and zoning”), then he goes on to explain that this creative choice preceded but has now been imposed by the pandemic – a symptom of liquid modernity, perhaps.
Covid, arguably, stole Marczak’s thunder. He was already photographing “bleak, empty, still places without people” to show “what the world could look like if something went really, really wrong. And then boom, the pandemic happened!” This reflects Marczak’s cynicism relative to contemporary consumer habits and international relations. “When I think about human history and what’s going on in the world, I’m not an optimist. I was trying to show that in my pictures, but it’s happening on its own.” In Marczak’s own words, it became “kind of weird to go out” in the last year because what he feared would happen did, and he no longer had to imagine it – “it’s always more fun to find something that you normally don’t see or most people don’t see, to work the imagination, but when the first lockdown took place, I could see emptiness everywhere. It became normal. The city was super quiet.” In reaction to this new quasi-apocalyptic reality, Marczak has plans (the specifics of which he only teased) to incorporate more people in upcoming works. This is facilitated by the much-awaited easing of lockdown restrictions, which have led to more popular use of green areas than before the pandemic – a shift in attitudes and behaviours that makes Marczak feel hopeful.
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For Marczak’s first few years here, he was mostly focused on getting settled and finding work. He currently works full-time as a picture framer, which allows him to finance and focus on the work he wants to make. “I don’t like compromises, so I am happy to get my money somewhere else and be able to do what I want to do. I don’t want to be and don’t know how to not be myself.” Marczak sells high-quality prints of individual works and series of works. He has exhibited at Ottawa’s Karsh-Masson Gallery in City Hall twice and is currently looking for gallery representation to put down roots in the Canadian art scene.
I, for one, left our conversation feeling inspired to look around me and pick out parts of my landscape that I never noticed before. A beautiful sunset, an odd-looking house, or a funky light fixture can each tell a story about our relationship to the world.