Magdalena Gryska, Zofia Adamiak

Nobody's Home
original technique, paintings and replicas found in the lumber place Boczów (60 items)

Oh, just stop knocking, stop scouting. The surface of the flat becomes enormous, unbearably empty. I'm staring at it, as it falls apart in my hands when I close my eyes. It goes off – and on, like a broken light in the hallway.

Silence fills everything densely, turns off the water on the stove – sits down. Words stumble in the throat and take on shapes of some sort on the walls; it gets white. 

I give it no thought at all, not at all do I think of nothing. I'm not really scared – and still: I collapse into the armchair, shatter into pieces in a time which, like this house, doesn't exist. Its centre covers no-one, doesn't shelter with its net curtains, bolts, casings, not even with its watchdog or your expectant gaze.

With my finger, I draw boundaries around myself – everything becomes easier, warmer and closer.

“Nobody's home,” you whisper in my ear. Listen! nobody's saying they don't like peas and could you not add them to the soup, nobody's taking off their shoes next to the stairs, nobody's fighting over the duvet on a cooler night; see? nobody's saying they regret not having become the dentist, nobody's painting the wall and grumbles that orange seems too dark, after all, it's the eastern part of the house.

Look! every face in the picture comes out of the frame and grows pale in milky walls of oblivion. 

A categorisation of information dissolves like a shaky jelly in the sun, and uniquenesses of events paint themselves over transparently. Your memories, you say, are mere short stories.

Still I feel that I truly remember what happened. I seem to remember. “You may have made it up.”

I arrange stories from home, from people, from faces and gestures next to each other – maybe, they were drawn through memory in markers – time after time – I might have not been listening too carefully.

We put them together, like puzzles, besides, one on top of the other, we let them mix and collide – the truth doesn't exist, after all – I tell you, silence!

“Do not forget me,” shut up.

I close disorganised drawers of memories; as it was, it is – and leave. I swim awkwardly through scraps of memory about myself, my frames and boundaries highly guarded with mad dogs. I shut the door.

Hello? I'm not at home, nobody's home.

— Zofia Adamiak