For generations, the house on Ogrodowa street number 59 has been the centrepiece of folklore surrounding our crumbling family dynasty.

For me, it is inseparable from the conflict between alienation from my kin, and the warm, fuzzy feeling of belonging embodied by the matriarch, my grandaunt.

Personal project
Poland, 2013

My childhood is synonymous with our trips to Muszyna, a small town by the Slovakian border. I didn't pay much attention to the usual family gossip. As a city boy from Vienna I was preoccupied by joys of the Polish countryside, like fly fishing and picking mushrooms in the forest.

With the passing of my grandfather in 1999 I didn't just lose one of the most important influences of my childhood. I also lost the naivety shielding me from the omnipresent family drama, which started to overshadow more and more of our interactions and making my trips back to Poland less and less frequent.

With the lightheartedness gone, my picture of the small town and my distant and not so distant relatives changed accordingly. With one foot in the past and one foot in the afterlife, the narrow gap in between seemed to be reserved for envy and compulsive trips to church.

An exodus of the youth, collapsing infrastructure and the stifling grip of catholicism are advancing the disintegration of social bonds way beyond my own kin.

Today, I mostly look back at those experiences through the prism of nostalgia. Their ambivalence influences questions that I keep getting confronted with, but haven't found answers for. What is home? Where do my values come from? How important are traditions? Am I Austrian or Polish? How much do I care about any of those?

What I do know is, my grandaunt's seemingly infinite faith, resilience and pragmatism held the entire show together ever since I can remember. She died six years after I took the last photos and I regret not having followed up more often. The house is now locked and deserted, tangled up in yet another final family dispute and awaiting to serve its last purpose.