“Something Will Remain”
17-11-2013
“Something Will Remain,” the title of which refers to a quotation of Zofia Rydet’s, is the name of a series of workshop meetings to be conducted by Aga Pajączkowska (of the Association of Creative Initiatives “ę”) in November and December 2013. The workshop will coincide with the launch of the zofiarydet.com web portal and virtual archive dedicated to the dissemination of Rydet’s Sociological Record cycle, and is to be carried out in conjunction with the Foundation for Visual Arts’s collaborative Rydet archival project.
A compelling, ancillary aspect of Rydet’s photographic legacy is the thought that, were she still busily alive, the Record would necessarily still be expanding. It would have long since grown to encompass a 21st-century Poland in which the sight of a laptop propped open on a farmhouse’s kitchen table wouldn’t seem in the least uncommon.
Rydet passed away in 1997, and yet the questions she asked of herself and her subjects remain perennially relevant: How do we live? What do we surround ourselves with on a daily basis? What objects, motifs, and accents shape and define the spaces in which we live and work? How do these spaces reflect who we are both as individuals and members of specific regional communities?
The “Something Will Remain” workshop will set out to incorporate these questions and Rydet’s on-the-ground documentary approach into the assemblage of a contemporary Record of sorts. Participants, working on their own and later collaboratively within small groups, will create portraits of family members, friends, acquaintances, and so on. These portraits will formally reference Rydet’s work, with individuals being depicted within the context of their houses or apartments.
These newly created photographic recordings, to be added to an online gallery on the website of the Zofia Rydet Foundation, are to stand on their own; to exist apart from parallels and overlaps. Of interest, though, is the degree to which this collective body of work will perhaps be visibly shaped by the continuing influence of Rydet the photographer, inquisitive spirit, and democratic observer.
Workshop conducted by Aga Pajączkowska