Patrycja Wojtas (born 1990 in Poland; lives and works in Warsaw, Poland). She works predominantly with documentary and conceptual photography. She graduated MA in Photography at National Filmschool in Åódź, Poland (2015). She took part in collective exhibitions during Fotofestiwal in Åódź (2012), Opolski Festiwal Fotografii (2012), Assemblage in Øksnehallen, Copenhagen (2014). Her individual exhibition (Cache series) took place in Szczecin thanks to support of LAJT project and Academy of Art (2017). She also cooperated with Archeology of Photography Foundation in Warsaw. Her artistic approach revolve around the issue of human relationship with nature and places where human presence is often indicated only by traces left by people or visible in found objects.
Patrycja Wojtas is among the selected lens-based artists that received a special mention in occasion of our issue #11 call for projects, with the series "Garden of Broken Dreams".
Garden of Broken Dreams surveys the remains of the Alternative Medicine Centre, a six-hectare area near Warsaw, Poland. These are tales of an exceptional place and of the traces of its unfullfiled history which is subject to the metabolic process, decay and reuse. It is, finally, an attempt at a holistic approach to the artifacts, to the area and to its past, all subject to the same course of events. Through the photographs, like in an archeologist’s work, the series surveys the relics of human activity: objects, wall paintings, stone animals. Discovered together, they arouse us to look beyond simple historical divisions, where it is possible for prehistory and remnants of modernity to meet as times that appear concurrently, like geological layers stirred by someone. Another element of the cycle are local plants appropriating the place again. Thanks to them a tension is activated between the photographed space which is undergoing changes, and the surface of negatives, that is, the space within the photograph’s physical dimension in which the image is captured.
Some of the photographic film rolls fermented for two months together with the plants which they presented, participating in this way in the metabolic process and in creating new images. Ruining the photograph becomes a way of involving it in the cycle of changes recounted by the image. It also reflects the human activity in the process of destroying natural environment. The rythm of particular compositions forms a part of a visual essay, an attempt at telling the story of this place from multiple perspectives.
