Judith Röder

Year of birth: 1978 Field: Visual arts City: Lower Silesia

Judith Röder will visit Lower Silesia once again, this time as part of a series of study visits organised as a result of collaboration between the Culture Zone Wrocław and the Wersja Foundation – one of the two non-governmental organisations from Wrocław, whose projects have been included in the AIR Wro programme in the last edition of the Competition for NGO. 

Starting in February, the German artist will continue her research on the visual landscape of Lower Silesia, which began in August last year. During her first stay, Judith Röder focused on exploring unusual places with intricate history and complex cultural identity. The original idea for the project was to compare the regional landscape with her homeland of Vulkaneifel – seemingly very closely resembling the Lower Silesian basin. Already during the first explorations, it turned out that the character of the two places considerably differed and the experience of spending time in some locations in Lower Silesia evokes the feeling of an unspecified lack, incompleteness. What seemed to bring both regions closer together was at the same time something that moved them away from each other.

Abandoned farmhouses, former state agricultural enterprises, palace parks, cemeteries and church ruins illustrate the turbulent history of the "Regained Territories", erased and quickly re-drawn with a completely different contour. Later, blurred once again as a result of political transformation and elaborated into a completely unexpected narrative.

Intrigued by the peculiar visual aspect on the one hand, and the ordinary aesthetics of everyday views on the other, the artist decided to capture the "spaces of disappearance" through the 16 mm camera's eye. The status of the explored places varies, as does their relationship with the local inhabitants, the political dimension of their history, or the phase of disappearance that affected them. In the case of Miedzianka, one of the destinations of this year's first visit, there is almost nothing left from a town with a brewery, a town hall and a mine. "The history of disappearance" of what once was a charming town has been described in a popular book by Filip Springer. Another place that the artist will visit is a small village of Gostków, with a monumental ruin of a former Evangelical church. The inhabitants of the village, feeling no prejudices, with a sense of social responsibility for space and memory, independently reconstructed a Protestant German cemetery that was repeatedly vandalized for several dozen years. The next direction of artistic research will be Sokolowsko - another example of a complete replacement of residents with a different social group. For many years, the once impressive Prussian health resort located at the foot of the Walbrzych Sudetes was dominated by the image of the deteriorating building of Dr. Brehmer's former sanatorium, later known as the Grunwald Sanatorium. After years of oblivion, thanks to the cultural involvement of the newly settled inhabitants enchanted by the beauty of the mountain village, the former Gorbersdorf is experiencing its second youth.

The landscapes researched by Judith Röder are places shaped both geologically (mines, sandstones, quarries) and culturally (architecture, urban planning) by their inhabitants. Years of presence of different social, ethnic and cultural groups have made their mark on the space. A certain trace has also been left by the lack of former inhabitants. The artist collects these fragments, trying to capture what may soon disappear from the surface of the earth in an experimental, artistic film form.  The film will be presented at a specially organised screening summing up the project.

Curator of the project: Joanna Kobyłt.