Paweł Starzec is a photographer, journalist, sociologist, and educator. Works on photographic documents. Mainly interested in how space and it’s context and meaning relate and in visualisation and documentation of events through their peripherals.
Visual sociologist, currently during Ph. D. studies, working in the field of mass visual communication and visual narratives. Art educator responsible for number of workshop programmes as a lecturer and teacher, co-founder of Paper Beats Rock foundation, current member of Azimuth Press collective.
Student of Institute of Creative Photography of Silesian University in Opava, and of Applied Sociology Department of University of Warsaw. DIY / zine culture enthusiast.
About ‘Makeshift’:
History is a settlement within the community, regarding how this community remembers the events that took place in the past.
The trend towards the construction and relying on the structured history in constructing order of the present time is an expression of its social significance. Group of people with the same belief about past events form a collective identity.
The nation, as an ethnic group owning an organised state, among its constitutive features have sharing common cultural and historical grounds. The culture of the community is based on shared history, taking shape of the established order of facts.
By common saying, that’s winners who write history. In terms of human aspect, the process of ethnic cleansing requires a lot of labour, and a well-built base of resources for any further development.
In a process of forced rearrangement of various groups of people, events tend to appear unplanned. Makeshift is a project on rewriting history in Bosnia and Hercegovina, relating to the mass atrocities of Bosnian War and their erased context.
Basing on the data of ICRC Final Report, I revisit places where atrocities were committed – in most cases, to find them renovated to serve former purpose of buildings of public utility.
History is a collectively set narration, so it has the ability of being rewritten from scratch, to omit thins that had to be forgotten. In present Bosnia, most of people had been directly, or indirectly affected by Bosnian War of 1991-1997 My goal was to tell their story, and the story of Bosnian buildings of public utility.
The entire landscape bears contamination that part of newly written history wants to erase.
