Obrazy bezdomności, obrazy bezdomne Europa 2017: konstelacje
Images of Homelessness, Homeless Images Europe 2017: Constellations

Summary/Abstract: In one of his letters written in 1937 the émigré Walter Benjamin mentioned the encroaching future as “a time to dream about a bombproof shelter”. Today, those words are becoming disturbingly topical. Once again, just as during the period of Benjamin’s enforced emigration, the question of literal and metaphorical homelessness, the absence of a home, the search for a haven and associated hospitality (or its lack) returns both as a figure and a concrete, individual experience. Tomasz Szerszeń would like to take a closer look at this problem via the experiences of his voyages: to Kharkiv, an important cultural centre along the Ukrainian-Russian border, a city of “vagabonds and poets”, and to the Greek island of Samothrace, the historical site of the Kabir mysteries and today an island of “defectors from civilisation” and “inner émigrés”, situated close to the transit routes followed by refugees sailing from Turkey. In both cases the real experiences of homelessness and seeking asylum appear within the context of images – photographs and films – connected with those concrete places. What is the relation between homelessness and hospitality? Can images render this complicated union? And finally: can photographs and images as such be homeless or hospitable? The frame for this dissertation is documenta 14 that takes place in Athens (2017), as well as Jacques Derrida’s essay Of Hospitality and Paul Virilio’s project Bunker Archeology. Finally the text creates a sort of Benjaminian constellation or cartography of Europe in crisis anno domini 2017.

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