Maciej Rawluk, Everything Folded. Bicycle, camera and suburbs.
The book Everything Folded is an album which is a record of several expeditions of the photographer Maciej Rawluk to the suburbs of Warsaw. A folding bicycle and a folded analogue Voigtländer 667 camera have become tools supporting the recording of what the suburbs of the great city consist of. Nearly 100 photographs create a kind of inventory of nature, a report on the suburbs. The set of photographs selected by the author presents a monotonous, uninteresting, chaotic space, which is a work of chance, a reflection of the state “in between”. The author looks at the city limits, but does not look for shortcomings, does not criticise. He tries to be an attentive observer of visual reality and record it objectively as far as possible.
The edges of the city are blurred, difficult to determine precisely. I wanted to get to know the space that ceases to be a village and turns into a city, though most often it is still something else, some separate form of space.
Maciej Rawluk, fragment of the text
On the map of several dozen of Maciej Rawluk's cycling excursions we can see the temporality and unidentified elements of the suburban landscape. Warsaw is at once a city of parts and a green archipelago, where built-up areas alternate with allotments and wastelands. It is worth noticing that the islands discovered by the artist are not oriented by him. He tries to reflect their diversity, show their advantages and shortcomings. It is clear that he understands the sense of a contemporary city and the great potential of what the Italian architect and theoretician Aldo Rossi called Città per parti - "a city of parts".
Tomasz Fudala, excerpt from the text
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Maciej Rawluk is an artist photographer and filmmaker. He is the author of books on long-term photographic projects, among others: Polish Stops, Bałuty - palimpsest, Setka, Posta Romana, Ojczyzna, Jedynka. He works at the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, where he runs the Photographic Documentary Studio at the Institute of Photography and Film.
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