Visual negotiation of identity and settlement of Poles in the so-called Recovered Territories: East Side Story by Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky

Migration images - migration of images

Paul Virilio (2009: 7—8), in his introduction to Native Land: Stop Eject, identified the important issue of migration on an unprecedented scale and asked the question, how do we deal with this constant movement, the constant movement of history in process? This issue—alongside fundamental socio-political, economic, cultural and existential problems—also correlates with the condition and potential of photographic images. We already know from Paul Ricoeur (2000: 6) that presence, on which the representation of the past seems to be based, manifests itself as the presence of an image. In this case we are dealing here with a particular type of image, namely with an image which would not only show and present this incessant movement of history in motion in narrative form, but which would also make its dynamics visible, becoming a processual phenomenon itself, in constant motion—already on the level inscribed in the medium of photography as such. Indeed, in the very conscious choice of photographic technique, the strategy of working with the resources of photographic archives and the juxtaposition of photographs, there is a visual narrative that points to a profound iconic difference from reality. This iconic difference allows photography to develop a dynamic visual story beyond words and not only illustrate or depict this constant movement of history in process, but also make it an immanent non-mimetic means of expression.

In this text, I will show one part of a series of photographs by Anne Peschken and Mark Pisarsky (Urban Art) entitled East Side Story. A photo research on migration and arrival stories (2019 on-going) ¹ as such images, related to the migration of people in the second half of the 20th century, which recorded this movement, action and process in its very medium. The focus will be on the photographs East Side Story I: Myślibórz, which began the series, and their subject concerns the settlement of Poles in the so-called Recovered Territories after the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the border between Poland and Germany along the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers. As the artists write (Urban Art, 2021):

East-Side-Story deals with the psychological technique of so-called family constallations in order to create a space for reflecting on migration and its effects across generations. Arrival stories and the topic of making one's home in a new environment are the main focus of the project. The re-enactments of old photographs found in private family albums are shot with a pinhole camera. A contradiction in terms! Long exposure times require the persons re-enacting the old photograph to freeze—thus heightening the concentration necessary to take up the positions of their ancestors in the historic image. ²

In the series East Side Story I: Myślibórz (Figure 1), the artists created eleven colour photographs characterised by the blurriness typical of pinhole photography.OPEN IN VIEWER

In the conference Photo Albums’ Twisted Meanings: Between nostalgia and trauma (Smolińska and Peschken, 2021), Peschken points out three types of photographic collections that they encountered during the project when selecting images to reproduce—if possible—with the participation of the descendants of the people depicted in them:

The first one was an old chocolate box full of old photographs deliberately left behind in a house that was sold. The second was a well-kept photo album with written comments that told the family history before and after the migrational re-start. The third was a collection of photos handed over to the local museum with no reference of the photographer. I would define these collections as the amnesic, historiographic and the preserving approach. Of all three categories we found at least two examples.

However, Peschken and Pisarsky worked not only with family albums and museum archives, but also with photographs that never existed, but functioned only as imagined images or memory-images in the memory of the inhabitants of Myślibórz, thus confirming Hans Belting’s (2014: 70) thesis that man is the medium and the place of images. The artists’ strategy also pointed to the fact that the photographs themselves also migrated and remained in motion, being abandoned in old chocolate boxes as unnecessary ballast of memory or wandering into the collection of the Museum of the Myśliborski Lake District [Muzeum Pojezierza Myśliborskiego] in order to remain anonymously in its collection for future generations, but not necessarily in the cherished family album. I shall analyse individual examples in the further part of this text, trying to demonstrate the specificity of each story connected with a given photograph, the happening of which was transformed by artists into the very medium of the photographic image. What I mean in relation to the East Side Story series is that this constant movement, mentioned metaphorically by Virilio, is contained both in each individual photograph and in their narrative arrangement. This narrative arrangement already appears at the level of the juxtaposition of the photographs in pairs: the archival one and the pinhole one, as well as when the entire series is exhibited in a gallery or museum and is always presented in a specific order from 1 to 11. This is also the arrangement adopted by the presentation on Peschken and Pisarsky’s website.

It is significant that the project East Side Story was initiated at a time when the waves of migration sweeping across the world are reaching their peak, and Virilio’s question not only does not lose, but constantly gains in relevance. It therefore has not only a historical dimension, but is an attempt to reflect more generally on the image possibility of representing migration and the migration of images, undertaken by the artistic duo Urban Art, who live and work in Berlin and Myślibórz. For years, Peschken and Pisarsky have been consistently moving between Germany and Poland, addressing in their art the issues of the Polish-German borderland and the phantom border, which—despite its shift in 1945 to the line of the Oder and Lusatian Neisse—still seems to be present in the mentality of the inhabitants of the so-called Recovered Territories, who still perceive these territories as post-German. As Peschken emphasised, the moment of starting work on the East Side Story series was not accidental: “In 2015 a new massive migration forged its way to Europe in the wake of the Syrian war. Public and governmental reactions to this crisis were in Germany and Poland diametrically opposed. We wondered why” (Smolińska and Peschken, 2021). The motivation was therefore political. The artists assumed that the inhabitants of the so-called Recovered Territories have in their family histories—often marked by trauma—experiences of displacement, migration and arrival in a new, ‘alien’ territory, which had to be tamed and in which they had to settle, which on a universal and existential level links them with the migrants from the second decade of the 21st century.

Peschken and Pisarsky thus initiated A photo research on migration and arrival stories among their own neighbours in Myślibórz, creating the series East Side Story, which—in my opinion—is worth analysing from the point of view of processuality, movement and action as well as embodiment inscribed in the very medium of the photographic image. I will carry out this analysis step by step, reaching for my own methodological toolbox, prepared and developed especially for this purpose, as Mieke Bal (2002) would say. My methodological toolbox—because of the subject matter involved—will be transdisciplinary. It will bring together research tools from art history, cultural anthropology, philosophy and sociology. I will treat the landscape of the so-called Recovered Territories as an active agent, inseparable from History and pointing to the constant Nachleben or the still palpable presence of the phantom Polish-German border from before the war. When looking at individual photographs, I will rely on methods characteristic of anthropology and the hermeneutics of the (photographic) image. In order to contextualise these photographs in relation to their historical, social and geopolitical backgrounds, I will draw inspiration from the methodology of border studies, i.e. de facto sociology and concepts such as borderscaping, phantom border and border assemblage. They will help me to underline the processual character of the Polish-German border itself, and the close connection between this dynamic character and the constant movement of history in motion—including the movement inscribed in the very media specificity of the photographic images from the East Side Story series. I will also be interested in the embodied perception of photographic images in relation to re-enactment strategies and the learning of history through the body and emotions rather than the mind.

Photographs from the East Side Story series against the phantom border

According to Karl Schlögel (2016: 111) all borders have a genesis, a time of impact and validity, and a time of decline: “Borders are ‘drawn’”. The Polish-German border was also drawn, which this German historian characterises as follows: “The history of twentieth-century Europe is littered with major displacements of borders.… These new boundaries include … the Oder–Neisse line, the work of the planning departments of several foreign ministries and the participants of major international conferences from Tehran to Yalta and Potsdam” (Schlögel, 2016: 107–108). As a result of these conferences, the largest population transfer in the history of modern Europe took place, forcing the inhabitants of the regions taken over by the Soviet Union to migrate to the so-called Recovered Territories, which the Germans living there had to leave in turn. Beata Halicka (2015) describes in detail the phenomenon of settling regions abandoned in a hurry by German inhabitants in her book ‘The Polish Wild West’. Forced Migrations and the Cultural Taming of the Oderland 1945-1948 [„Polski Dziki Zachód”. Przymusowe migracje i kulturowe oswajania Nadodrza 1945-1948]. The very title of this publication points to the need to tame a new place of residence, which is also confirmed by the photographs chosen by Peschken and Pisarsky to be reproduced as part of the East Side Story project, for which—from Berlin‘s perspective—it is more like the Wild East.

From the point of view of the motifs they depict, I would divide these eleven photographs into four thematic groups: work and everyday life, as well as—and this is presented in only one photograph for each type—the occupation of post-German houses and the erasing of traces of Germanness in the so-called Recovered Territories. However, these farm labour and everyday life motifs are not as neutral as they might seem at first glance, because they are set in the ‘Polish Wild West’, i.e. in lands that have been settled so recently after arriving from completely different territories. It’s sowing fields that not so long ago were ‘foreign’; harvesting on a combine, and so reaping from land that has only recently been cultivated. The family posing on the cart before leaving the yard, which one slowly and distrustfully begins to perceive as one's own; a fishing trip in the car; strolls in the town with the pram; playing on the swings in the park; posing by the fountain in fashionable dresses or making a toast at home are all strategies of familiarising oneself with new surroundings, recorded in photographic images as if in a need to make one’s presence there credible through images. According to Anne Ring Petersen (2017: 9), who studies the relation between visual culture and migration, taking such photographs is supposed to confirm identity, belonging, visibility and recognition. Therefore, the newly arrived migrants in the so-called Recovered Territories had the need to photograph themselves and create galleries of their own internal images. According to Belting, our internal images are not always individual in nature, but even when they are of collective origin, they become internalised so that we consider them as our own.

Additionally, their manifestations of settledness and carefreeness were, after all, staged in the face of a phantom border and the fears and uncertainties associated with the potential return of displaced Germans. The notion of a phantom border points to the constant impact of borders that have been abolished or moved to another place. Researchers of this phenomenon emphasise, that, like phantoms, old territorial divisions still seem to characterise contemporary societies in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. With the newly coined word—or metaphor—of ‘phantom borders’, the question about the historical conditions of regional differences or their specificity should be asked from a new perspective. In this way, not only borders, but also regions should be questioned as potential ‘phantoms’ (Hirschhausen von et al., 2015: 7). Further, scholars ask how and on which actors the disappeared borders interact, and how their presence in the present is updated. The so-called Recovered Territories are a phantom in themselves, created as a result of the shifting of the Polish-German border, which conditioned the lives of the new inhabitants resettled in these territories and influenced the character of the private photographs they created. These actors, however, who feel the presence of the phantom border, are not only those who came to this region just after the Second World War, but also their descendants, whom Peschken and Pisarsky engaged to recreate and repeat selected photographs. It is the next generations, the successors of those who arrived, who redefine with their everyday practices the condition of the phantom border and the status of the so-called Recovered Territories, perceived as a phantom in itself. Their presence in the photographs from the East Side Story series is in line with the findings of the authors of publications on the specificity of this phenomenon: From a situational point of view, phantom borders are understood neither as immutable structures nor as purely discursive constructions, but rather as the result of the interaction of three intertwined levels: phantom borders are simultaneously imagined in mental maps and discourses, experienced and perceived by actors, and shaped and continuously updated through everyday practices and implemented through planned political and administrative interventions. They are context-dependent and therefore phantom in nature (Hirschhausen von et al., 2015: 9).

Their thematisation, in turn, occurs—importantly—in relation to family albums and photography that can be described as vernacular. Contemporary studies of photographs depicting practices of everyday life and photographic albums, referring to the theses of Henry Lefebvre (2014), treat vernacular photography as a lens through which individuals negotiate important political decisions that govern their lives, their strategies of self-representation, and their resistance or conformity to political and social regulations. The family photographs, used by Peschken and Pisarsky in their East Side Story series to re-enact them, cannot therefore be seen as a neutral medium for showing reality, but rather as actively mediating constructs and an imagined version of the present to be encountered by the future viewer. This, then, is how one should look at the happening of photographs, which are the starting point of A photo research on migration and arrival stories—only when I ask about the relationship between vernacular photography and visual culture from a critical perspective that implies political, ideological and social contexts, will these seemingly ordinary photographs say more about human behaviour and social patterns of behaviour (Campt et al., 2020). This perspective thus makes it possible to take into account the presence of a phantom border that is palpable in relation to a specific social group, namely the newcomers to the so-called Recovered Territories. With the East Side Story series, Peschken and Pisarsky critically and subversively activate those aspects that at first glance seem merely everyday, conventional, and banal, and in fact constitute a strategy for taming the Polish-German borderland, ‘drawn’ completely anew after the war.

By photographing themselves while working on the land, the newcomers revealed the need to find a stabilising source of identity, which—as Wojciech Michera (2017: 125) emphasises—is connected with the search for such a world that would be similar to the homeland from the autochthonous myth. Peschken and Pisarsky’s choice of photographs, showing the sowing and harvesting of crops, thus seems perfectly apt in relation to the question of the process of arrival, settlement and establishment in the so-called Recovered Territories. As this researcher further states (Michera, 2017: 125):

The subjective ‘I’ inscribed in such a model, like a double looking for the lost original, is forced (…) to fictionalise its autobiography, to incessantly repeat the work of ‘sewing together’, to stage images of itself, to put on a theatrical mask, to call itself ‘he’, which (as Roland Barthes noticed) ‘may mean: I talk about myself as if I were a little bit dead’. For all identity, from this point of view, can no longer have the character of a ‘living presence’, or even of a ‘living memory’, but only of a re-construction and re-creation forced by this original, ‘castration’ cut—it becomes an ‘image’.

The newcomers, who felt the presence and influence of the phantom border, fictionalised their biographies in a similar way. They systematically carried out this work of stitching together and presented themselves in photographs in such a way as to give the impression of being settled or having the right to sow and harvest crops from this very land. This aspect of identity and the past becoming an image was brought out particularly vividly in the East Side Story project, where staged photographs were re-enacted, pointing to the processual character of the image and its potential to record the happening of history within itself.

The East Side Story series as an example of border art

The very place where the East Side Story series was created, in the vicinity of the Polish-German border, positions the project within the border art trend, and this classification is further strengthened by playing with the notion of a phantom border. This trend was defined in the mid-1980s to describe artistic practices on the US-Mexican border. Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary (2012) refers to this phenomenon using terms such as art on the border, art born of the border, or art against the border. Border art is thus art rooted in its geo- and sociopolitical context, addressing issues such as the status of borders, surveillance, nationality, migration and identity, as well as religious, linguistic, cultural and economic differences and diversity. It is not tied to any medium and makes full use of the whole range of expressive means developed by contemporary art, including conceptual practices and activism.

From a border art perspective, the German-Polish border is a regional border and not a hot spot like the US-Mexican and Israeli-Palestinian borders (Guinard, 2018: 164). Nevertheless, Peschken and Pisarsky’s project fits into the key categories associated with border art, such as, for example, the creation of narratives alternative to those officially in force. It is thus a politically engaged and relational art, and the artists work in the borderlands as critical researchers who redefine aesthetic regimes, treating vernacular photography as a lens through which important historical-social-political conditions are negotiated and in which strategies of self-representation and negotiation of the identity of the newcomers are constructed.

Border art itself, however, is also infected with a kind of ambivalence: as Pauline Guinard writes, leaving aside the potential of border art to question or even contest the existence of borders, it remains ambiguous because it can also contribute to the production of borders and to their reinforcement by giving them a certain reality and visibility (Guinard, 2018: 163). The photographs from the East Side Story series also contain this ambivalence: they activate the presence of a phantom border, i.e. the former Polish-German border, and indicate the existence of the current one, currently located on the line of the Oder and Lusatian Neisse. They do not, of course, do so literally by depicting the border rivers, but—by juxtaposing contemporary and archival photographs—remind us of the shifting of the border in 1945 and the great post-war displacements and migrations of people.

In the context of the analyses of the project East Side Story and the questions of happening embedded in the images themselves, the notion of borderscape and its version emphasising processuality, borderscaping (Schimanski and Wolfe, 2007: 7), seem crucial. The concept of borderscaping can thus be used as a conceptual and analytical tool for understanding the displaced, fluid and dispersed character of the borders of the so-called Recovered Territories. This dynamic and processual nature of borders, made visible in individual photographs from the East Side Story series, is in turn connected with processes of differentiation that are constantly stimulated by human interactions, including contemporary migration waves. Paraphrasing Doreen Massey’s thesis on places from the perspective of shaping borders, one can say that borders should not be perceived as lines on maps, but as integrations of space and time (Massey, 2005: 131), as spatial and temporal events, where the border is a discursive landscape of competing meanings (Rajam and Grundy-Warr, 2007: XV). It is therefore primarily about shaping the border not on the ground, but in the mental landscapes of the borderland’s inhabitants. Borderscaping makes it possible to establish a strong link between the processes of social and political transformation, conceptual change and local experience (Brambilla et al., 2015), related in this case to the historically difficult construct of the so-called Recovered Territories.

In her analysis of the concept of borderscaping, Chiara Brambilla demonstrates a way of connecting border experiences with representations of borders in border art by redefining borders as a function of the relationship between politics and aesthetics—analogous to Peschken and Pisarsky, who structured their photo research of migration and arrival stories in such a way as to continually thematise the tension between the political overtones of the images and the seemingly innocent photographs from family albums. In turn, Anke Strüver, another border art researcher, points out that borderscaping is realised most fully precisely in art, because the construction of boundaries ‘takes place’ through representations, through performative acts, through acts of narration, visualisation and imagination with their interpretations (Strüver, 2005: 167). Peschken and Pisarsky’s project is thus an example of borderscaping in a model form, because—through the perspective of the borderland—it is possible to capture the dynamic, mobile and multidimensional character of both the Polish-German phantom border and the current border on the Oder and Neisse rivers in space and time.

In the context of the conceptual grid used in critical border (art) studies, two photographs from the series East Side Story I: Myślibórz seem particularly intriguing, namely number 2, described by the artists as 2. Story: In front of the house (Figure 2), and number 5 Story: Whitewashing (Figure 3). Both shots taken by Peschken and Pisarsky thematise the Second World War and the shifting of borders, which contributed to gigantic migrations and the triggering of border processes involving the complete and violent exchange of people in the region. In the background of both visual narratives shown, issues related to borderscaping and the critical potential of the term border assemblage are activated, through which the East Side Story series situates itself in relation to the de-territorialization of the border and the often completely surprising roles of the actors involved in these dynamic transformations.OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

East Side Story I: Myślibórz. 5. Story: Whitewashing by Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky. 2019. C-Prints of archival photography 24.5 × 17.3 cm, computer drawing 18.8 × 18.4 cm and pinhole photography 34 × 52 cm. Framed 91 × 71 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

The first photo on the project website is accompanied by the following description: “During the advance on Berlin in 1945, soldier K. attached a note on the door of an empty house in the eastern Oder foothills: ‘Occupied by a Polish soldier’. At the time, his family was still in a Siberian camp, where they had been interned after eviction from their own home in eastern Poland. Soldier K. survived the Battle of Berlin, celebrated the victory over Hitler and then returned to the empty house. His descendants live there to this day. His great-grandson poses for the pinhole camera” (Urban Art, 2021) . Peschken and Pisarsky, having heard the story told by their neighbours about the occupation of a house in the so-called Recovered Territories by a Polish soldier, decided therefore to photograph an event that had never been photographed as such, but existed only as a family myth and imaginary image. In the story of this inhabitant of Myślibórz there was also a photograph, then thought to be lost, showing his father in uniform with a gun, which he remembered very meticulously. Peschken described in more detail the story of the making of this photograph from the East Side Story series (Smolińska and Peschken, 2021):

One of the first photos we arranged was rather an enactment than a re-enactment, because the original photo was at the time missing (part of an amnesic collection). All we had was the vivid memory of our neighbour, who told us the following story: As a young boy, he and his family were in a Siberian camp, where they had been interned after eviction from their own home in eastern Poland. In 1944/45 his father could join the Red Army in a Polish division and took part in the advance on Berlin. During the campaign he came through the eastern Oder foothills. On an empty house, whose inhabitants had fled, he attached a note, saying: ‘Occupied by a Polish soldier’”. ³

As Hans Belting put it, we were therefore dealing with the so-called internal image, which are known as endogenous images or images belonging to the body. The artists decided to stage the soldier’s pose from that very photo in front of the house, on which he hung a piece of paper informing that he had occupied the property. When the pinhole photograph had already been taken, the old photo was unexpectedly found in a family collection in another town—it turned out that the artists’ neighbour’s memory as a place and image carrier was unreliable in only one respect: on the original, the gun was held in the opposite direction. On the website presenting the project, Peschken and Pisarsky juxtaposed a black-and-white, slightly deteriorated photograph of a soldier, a drawing showing him hanging a card on a selected house, and a photograph staged with the participation of the brave soldier’s great-grandson. This triad brings to light—besides the complicated processes of borderscaping—also the question of migration and movement of images which—like this old photograph—changed their place of stay or which moved only in the memory and imagination of the members of the family still living in the occupied house. The soldier, standing proudly with his weapon, is an actor caught up in geo- and socio-political conditions, who renegotiates his own identity, making a self-(re)presentation and pointing to the de-territorialisation of the border and initiating new practices, characteristic of borders in the process of their unfolding and becoming anew.

Another actor, active in the border assemblage of the so-called Recovered Territories and struggling with its heterogeneous character, is the son of the post-war mayor of Witnica, identified by Peschken and Pisarsky as Mr. Cz. 5. Story: Whitewashing (Figure 3) was described as follows: “As a young boy scout Mr. Cz. was instructed by his father, who had recently become mayor of the western Polish town of Witnica, to remove German all signs and inscriptions or paint them over” (Urban Art, 2021). He thus operates in a border landscape, rich in material and semiotic elements that constantly activate the presence of the Polish-German border, both the phantom one and the one recently drawn on the Oder and Lusatian Neisse. On the project’s website, this story is accompanied by a black-and-white family photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Cz., a sketch showing a teenager erasing a German inscription, and a photograph taken by Peschken and Pisarsky in 2019 using the pinhole technique. In the latter, the inscription “Ohne Fleiß, kein Preis” on a brick school building is being removed. Peschken and Pisarsky again refer to a remembered image whose place and medium was Mr Cz. himself, not any real photograph.

The actions, carried out by the son of the mayor of Witnica at his father’s behest, were thus intended to remove the factors destabilising the newly gained equilibrium in the so-called Recovered Territories and to erase the feeling of proximity to the phantom border and its semantic, expressive potential. Peschken and Pisarsky chose this very moment as representative of a whole class of analogous actions undertaken at the time. It is a performative act, performed after the war and reconstructed in the present day, which in the East Side Story series is subject to representation in order to critically point to socio-political practices of borderscaping developed in relation to the border as a temporal and spatial phenomenon, and not merely a demarcation line on the ground and on the map. Photograph No. 5 Story: Whitewashing thus touches upon the problems of arriving in foreign lands, settling them and erasing the traces of culture that previously existed in the Oderland. It is a testimony to the long-term process of grappling with a foreign cultural idiom, first by rejecting it completely, and then—gradually—by assimilating and learning.

The East Side Story series as an example of border art thus opens up a discussion on the potential of art in relation to history, politics and aesthetic regimes (Rancière, 2013) in the Polish-German borderland landscape. As Brambilla vigilantly observes (Brambilla, 2015: 20), such artistic initiatives have the potential to create resistance against the dominant political narratives through critical acts of bordercaping and questioning of the official historical policy of both countries, which changes depending on the strategy of the ruling parties. As Anna Markowska and Regina Kulig-Posłuszny, editors of the publication Polish Art in the Western and Northern Territories from 1981 to the Present [Sztuka polska na Ziemiach Zachodnich i Północnych od 1981 roku do współczesności], emphasise in this context, “Polish culture after the democratic transformation of the state has been persistently striving for a suppressed polyphony, and by critically examining the existing discourses, it includes in the area of ‘our’ heritage what was previously defined as ‘foreign’” (Markowska and Kulig-Posłuszny, 2019: 11). The researchers point, among others, to the literature of Olga Tokarczuk and to the phenomenon of the so-called regional cultural memory, which fosters the construction of a different past and a different tradition and uncovers silences, which affects the way we see our present (Markowska and Kulig-Posłuszny, 2019: 16).

The term borderscaping and the treatment of borders as spatial and temporal events in a geopolitical, historical and social context not only make it possible to perceive the so called Recovered Territories and Myslibórz lying there as a discursive landscape of competing meanings, but also—with their inherent potential to indicate the fluid and dispersed character of border narratives and the region as a border assemblage—draw attention to the processuality and happening inherent in the photographs from the East Side Story series. It is the constant movement of history in motion; I would add—it is also the constant movement of politics in motion. These dynamics, however, takes place not only at the level of depicted, often completely fascinating narrations, but immanently belongs to the order of visuality and the strategy of creating images that depict them.

Conclusion: Re-enactment and embodiment

The specific and multifaceted order of visuality, which was developed in the East Side Story series, is closely related to the potential of pinhole photography, its assigned blurriness and the constant reinventing of the medium (Krauss, 1999) in order to include the story of migration not only in the narrative but also in the visual. As Petersen aptly puts it, migration—influencing politics and aesthetics and revealing itself as the subject of artwork—also activates the migratory nature of visual forms themselves (Petersen, 2017: 1 and 9).

Reaching for the technique of pinhole photography and its inherent blurriness, the authors of the East Side Story series sought to capture a shimmering image of the past from a present perspective. Klaus Honnef (2012: 408), a researcher on the semantics of blurriness, suggests that this technique has a strong affective charge in it. The very choice of this technique by Peschken and Pisarsky thus appears, in this context, to be significant and directed towards activating the affective function of photography, related to both its documentary and commemorative roles. According to Honnef, working with the so-called pinhole enables the transformation of the known into the unknown, offering a different image of the visible world than the one we have tamed. These photographs lose the quality of visual clichés, because suddenly from beyond the stereotypes shines through an image in which temporality is set aside and its beauty is built on technical imperfection: these are images that are vivid and irritating in the best sense of the word, Honnef concludes.

Within the activation of the dynamic, processual and migratory nature of the visual forms themselves, emblematic of the East Side Story series, alongside the technique of pinhole photography and out-of-focus, the strategy of re-enactment, closely linked to iterability and an aesthetic experience defined as embodiment, also plays a key role. According to the researchers of reenactment, it allows for the negation and even the abolition of the distance and the clear division between the present and the past, which is done in performative and affective terms (Schwarz, 2014: 125). Furthermore, it is an expression of the quest for authenticity and represents a kind of epistemology that refers to the body and feeling with all the senses. Its key features also include mediality, as it operates in relation to visual codes associated with cultural memory (Schwarz, 2014: 125—127). Re-enactment is also ascribed a high critical, deconstructive and emancipatory potential, as the phenomenon invites a rethinking of memory, theory and history, which is always done through individual motivation (Blackson, 2007).

Importantly from the perspective of the East Side Story project, the re-enactments also initiate questions about what really happened and how history has been mediatised—in this case, why the newcomers were mostly photographed as already settled. Paradoxically, this question is posed through the re-enactment of representations of the past, which emphatically highlights the strictly mediated nature of history. Furthermore, re-enactments analyse the relevance of the past for the present, activating immersion, embodiment and empathy (Arns, 2007: 41—43). Direct engagement, which emphasises the active nature of aesthetic experience and participation as its essential quality, occurs—according to Arnold Berleant and his concept of re-thinking aesthetics—in many different orders of action, including perceptual, consciousness, physical and social orders. In the context of the East Side Story series, the models were at the same time participants in the re-enactment and—when the photographs were finished—they became the recipients. When we read the work as a process rather than as a product or object, we perceive it as a network of interplay between many actors and the relationships between them (Kaitavouri, 2018: 99), which is also recorded in the visual nature of the photographs.

Moreover—according to Berleant (2016)—it should be understood as embodied, because the body has the power to change the nature of things much more powerfully than the mind. Its inclusion in aesthetic activity, as is the case in the strategy of re-enactment, contributes to the fact that meanings are experienced rather than cognisable by reason, although they also include culture, history and human experience. In this way, as a result of the processual and performative nature of the East Side Story series, viewers of these photographs are meant to bodily feel the experience of migration, arrival and settlement from a present-day perspective. However, it is not just about the models themselves, posing for the photographs, but all potential viewers in whom—by activating the migratory nature of the visual forms themselves and leaving traces of the process of the photographs in their media-image layer—this embodiment resonates as a perceptual aesthetic experience. According to Belting, perception as well as representation have the character of—symmetrically corresponding—social acts, and the media control our experience of the body through the act of viewing.

Aleida Assmann (1991: 13), investigating the forms and functions of cultural memory, pointed out that memory constructs the past in a similar way to archaeology, because—by tapping into its resources—we act as if we are excavating something from the past or bringing something hidden to the surface . In their series, Peschken and Pisarsky develop an embodied archaeology of memory, which, according to Yannis Hamilakis (Hamilakis et al., 2002; Hamilakis, 2013), needs an intense physical engagement with the material traces of the past to initiate a multi-sensory experience. This kind of corporeal and sensory archaeology of memory can uncover lost, repressed and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans not only in the field of classical archaeology, but also, as Peschken and Pisarsky's project shows, in relation to old photographs from photo albums. According to Hamilakis, sensory memory—through the body—can help us rethink such important issues as the production of ancestral heritage to large-scale social change. In the context of East Side Story, social change would mean accepting that many Poles are in fact migrants, which contradicts the image of Poland constructed both after the war and now. Inscribed in the pictorial structure of the pinhole photographs, the strategies of re-enactment and embodied archaeology of memory bring the traumatic experiences of post-war migration, arrival and settlement—through their repetition—into a symbolic order.

Reflecting on the tension between history, memory, identity and politics and activating the critical potential of borderscaping, Peschken and Pisarsky transform the landscape of the Polish-German borderland into an heterogenous narrative agent. East Side Story is thus a transgenerational corpography of memory that demonstrates that migration is a crucial and inalienable part of Polish history. It is a visual paraphrase of Virilio’s question of how we cope with the constant movement of history in motion, an issue that the artists addressed not only in the representational and narrative layer itself, but also in the intra-image structure, which enshrined the processuality and happening ascribed to the artistic strategies they so accurately chose.