In the same city, under the same sky…

The project In the Same City, Under the Same Sky… was begun during Anna Konik’s stay in Stockholm. In an attempt to understand the structure of the city and the essence of its homogeneous centre, Konik reached the suburbs, separated from the heart of the capital by a wide green belt. She recorded there the stories of seven immigrant women from Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan and Afghanistan, who had come to Sweden for various tragic reasons. Their stories were told in front of the camera by native Swedish women. The next instalment of the project, which now numbers five parts (35 stories), took place in Białystok. This time Konik worked with Chechen and Ingushetian women staying at the “Budowlani” refugee centre. Their accounts were conveyed by Białystok women speaking in their own homes.

These narratives, while individual, share some common features. None of the women left her homeland voluntarily; they were fleeing war, death, religious persecution and social stigma. Most are single mothers, who are estranged from their families and whose husbands are dead or their fate is unknown. In their new places, they feel excluded. Not having a refugee status, they cannot go to work, while the language barrier hinders their finding a place in the new reality. Being confined to the refugee centre, which is depressing, also in terms of architecture, the monotony of their lives is wearisome. And most painful of all is the lack of acceptance on the part of the local community; the sideways glances of the locals, the harsh comments, and the resulting fear. Yet these stories are not devoid of optimism and a desire to build a new life, dictated by the women’s thinking of their children.

Inviting Polish women to take part in the project, Konik confronted them with an irrational fear of the Other. Conditioned by language, religion and culture, this fear shapes the attitudes of the local community, casting immigrant women out of its boundaries. One of the Konik’s interlocutors said that she wished that the townspeople “put themselves in our place”. Konik created precisely this situation. Polish women spoke in the first person, allowing the Others’ stories to sound out in correct Polish, and lent them their faces. The incongruity of the content with the narrators highlighted the barriers, but also set in motion a mechanism for breaking them down. None of the narrating women could speak without emotion. They were suddenly They – the Others. Empathy, awakened by Konik’s undertaking, became the category that imposed order on these encounters, cracking the thick walls of stereotypes.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

[…] In Stockholm, I met seven women – refugees from Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan and Afghanistan; in Białystok I met several women from Chechnya and one from Ingushetia. In them I discovered unutterable sadness because the sense of wasted time and failure is tremendous. They are prisoners of place and reality; they have been damned and forgotten. They recount stories of death, longing, love and pain, giving confirmation of the fact that individual intentions are futile in the face of the rules governing society [Émile Durkheim].

I invited seven Swedish and seven Polish women to participate in my project In the same city, under the same sky… in an attempt to combine two different worlds. In their own apartments, they retold stories of immigrants living in the Muslim enclave in Stockholm or the refugee centre “Budowlani” in Białystok they had never met, stories which I had recorded and written down beforehand, trying to understand the fate of the other. Women who have never experienced war or social exclusion narrate stories of women who have suffered severely from them. These women from the centre lend their voices, their good Swedish or Polish, their apartments. They have made it possible for the others to be heard, for their stories to be told. Entirely separate lives have met for a brief moment; they have found twin completion and longed-for understanding.

Anna Konik
translated from Polish by Monika Ujma

Excerpt from the essay ‘Behind Invisible Walls Invisible People Live…’ by Anna Konik, published in the book NEGOTIATIONS. Selected artistic projects carried out by the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok within the framework of the educational programme Plac Zabaw Arsenał, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2013

Anda Rottenberg
The Stranger Is Me

The concept of other has many different aspects and shades, but it invariably denotes a member of a minority confronted with a majority. The Other sticks out because of their clothes, skin colour, language, sexual preferences, denomination as well as behaviour, way of life or earning money. The Other tends to have different experiences, including having to cope with grim fate, disease, disability, homelessness or uprooting. […]

Many-faceted strangeness puts the person in question in a decidedly more complex situation. This is the kind of strangeness experienced by political refugees, especially women. In the case of female fugitives from the Near East or Asia Minor to the Nordic or even Slavic part of Europe, we deal with cultural and religious strangeness, including language barrier and unusual clothing, as well as being subjected to experiences unknown to our generation, in our part of the world, such as threat to life, tortures, rapes or hunger. This sort of strangeness leads to isolation within societies of the states that were to provide the refugees with a safe haven. Anna Konik does not allow them to speak directly for themselves; stories of Somali, Chechen, Afghan or Turkish women are delivered by members of the majority, by women who enjoy all privileges, who are one of us in their mother country. As a consequence, they can enter somebody else’s life, forced to leave the secure realm of their own existence for a while, and identify with the other, with a strange and rejected person. Narrations of refugees living in a remote district in Stockholm as well as those resettled in Białystok are constructed in this way. As regards the essence, the artistic project has become one with an educational programme run by Magdalena Godlewska-Siwerska at the Arsenal Gallery, aimed at mutual familiarization of cultures and customs and thus at easing pressures and, possibly, lowering the invisible barrier of strangeness which divides both communities. Transmission of the fate of the other via a familiar and accepted one of us renders the story more audible; after all, one of us is always more reliable than the stranger. Before this transmission was possible, the world of refugees existing in isolation from local communities had to be penetrated, the trust of these people had to be gained and the refugees had to be encouraged to confide. And then – before she gave her own face and voice to a stranger she has never met – the one of us had to put in the effort to “impersonate” her, to adopt her viewpoint, to envisage her dramatic experiences and traumas as well as her cultural and religious conditioning. This would not have been possible if she had failed to overcome prejudices. The Arsenal Gallery provided neutral space for negotiations in this process. It took months of meetings and discussions between the curator, the artist and the people selected for the project for the work to be eventually created and presented to the participants (and the protagonists) in the same place that was now familiar and secure. We – viewers, have received the final product entitled W tym samym mieście, pod tym samym niebem… [In the same city, under the same sky…]. Amidst the polyphony of stories coming to us from numerous screens, we are, unwittingly, absorbed in a world which we have never had a chance of knowing before. We may feel empathy and, because the stories of the protagonists have been moved to the narrators, or subjects have been exchanged, we may also perceive ourselves as strangers as the concepts of one of us and stranger are as occasional as healthy and sick.

Anna Konik’s work reminds us of the fact that homelessness, poverty, disease, uprooting or the necessity to seek asylum in another country is just around the corner. And then we shall say: the stranger is me.
translated from Polish by Monika Ujma

The essay published in the book NEGOTIATIONS. Selected artistic projects carried out by the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok within the framework of the educational programme Plac Zabaw Arsenał, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2013

More about all parts of Anna Konik’s project In the Same City, Under the Same Sky…:
https://www.annakonik.art.pl/in-the-same-city-under-the-same-sky