A photographic research in the East
In her first publication, Pia Pollmanns combines the story of her grandmother Elisa Kosch with photographic research conducted in the former district of Neumarkt near Breslau. Written for family use, the grandmother's account reports soberly and rather unsentimentally on rural life in the Silesian province. It tells of the expulsion of the Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the subsequent westward shift of Poland by the victorious powers. In the same sober manner as the text by her grandmother, Pia Pollmanns' pictures show the local, still agrarian character of the landscape, with the tristesse of desert-like agriculture common with the EU, and the equally well-known decay of the big farms. Post-socialist in nature, the impressively portrayed landscape meanwhile corresponds to that of the »western« non-place, with its predominant and omnipresent mix of industrial perfection of agricultural cultivation and the disintegration of rural traditions and village structures.

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