Pia PollmannsDie Wege der Elisa Kosch

In her first publication, Pia Pollmanns combines the story of her grandmother Elisa Kosch with a photographic investigation in the former district of Neumarkt near Breslau. Her grandmother’s account, compiled for family use, tells in sober and largely unsentimental terms of rural life in the Silesian provinces and of the expulsion of the Germans as a result of the Second World War and the westward shift of Poland imposed by the victorious powers. Just as soberly as her grandmother’s text, Pia Pollmanns’ images show the present day there, still strongly agrarian in character, with the EU-standard dreariness of desert-like field cultivation and the equally familiar decay of the great manor farms. The impressively portrayed landscape of post-socialist character by now corresponds to that of the “Western” non-places, where the same mixture of the industrial perfection of cultivation and the disintegration of rural traditions and village structures prevails everywhere.

Exhibition:
Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst, 22/11/2019 – 15/3/2020