Karolina Grzywnowicz

Voids. A Walk is an artistic intervention carried out in a nonplace of memory—a site identified in trauma theory as one affected by violence and repression. After World War II, many villages in south-eastern Poland were forcibly depopulated and disappeared from the map. Their inhabitants were compelled to relocate to the Soviet Union or, in subsequent phases of the resettlement campaign, to Poland’s newly acquired eastern territories. In many cases, there are no commemorations to mark this traumatic history. Those who were not subject to the displacement campaigns, as well as those who later settled near these vanished settlements tend to regard them with superstition and taboo. These are purposefully forgotten places — gaps in the otherwise tamed landscape.

The intervention took the form of a guided walk to one such abandoned village—a place shunned by local residents—and it became a ritualised act, an attempt to break existing taboos and demystify this space by reintroducing human presence into an area contaminated with death and suffering. Remarkably, most participants were visiting the site for the first time, despite having spent their entire lives within a ten-minute walking distance of the former settlement.