Rotterdam, Baroque, and Trauma
Julia Medyńska’s works refer the viewer to distant times, often to Dutch art. That is why I have set the photos of her works in interiors I deal with on a daily basis in the Netherlands, where I am studying at the Willem de Koonig Academie in Rotterdam. I sought out dark, historical locations, in the style of the Northern Baroque.
I took all the photos of the interiors and architecture with an analogue Nikon F3 camera from the 1980s, which had previously belonged to my grandfather, Oktawian Fedak. I used 35mm Ultramax 400 film. Analogue photography is an artistic language. I chose it because I despise mimetism. Analogue is a thicker, tangible barrier between the photographer and the captured object. The negative is something material, while for me, a digital photograph is only code. I used Adobe Photoshop to place the paintings in the analogue photographs.
The following are the Rotterdam locations that brought Medyńska’s art to mind and where I decided it was appropriate to ‘hang’ her paintings: three canvases ended up on the walls of my school, located at No. 10 Blaak Street, in a 1920s building that was once a bank. It has green walls and panelling. I placed another three pictures on the walls of the nineteenth century De Ster mill near Kralingse Lake. It is a half-museum and half-still functioning mill, where spices like cinnamon are ground.
I could not resist and laid one of the canvases on a snowy path leading to a modernist villa in the Kralingen district — it could have appeared in the thriller Gone Girl, and it worked perfectly for me. I know the building, as I have lived in this district and rode my bicycle past it many times. The last painting, a portrait, rested against the decorative door of a tenement house on Jerichoslaan Street. The building dates back to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and — like the whole street — survived despite Luftwaffe bombings in 1940. I often think that Rotterdam is the Warsaw of the north: similar architecture, similar trauma. If we want to look at Medyńska as a bridge between the Baroque and modernity, then Rotterdam is the same in terms of urban planning, hence the photos.
