SERATONIN (Poland, 2008-2009)

Sometimes you see someone walking along, who fascinates you for reasons that are not clear. Take the Polish woman Ewa, an old lady in Cracow. After years her neighbour Lorenzo Castore was able to penetrate her world. Castore describes his first visit to Ewa’s house as leaving the normal world. ‘You come into another dimension, an interior landscape, a state of mind. The signs of poverty are everywhere, everything is rotting, everything stinks.’ Ewa turned out to live with her brother Piotr. They had once belonged to the well-to-do middle class, but over the years the family had fallen on hard times. On the basis of his own photographs and the childhood photographs that Ewa and Piotr gave him Castore tried to reconstruct their lives. Why? ‘In order to share human experience. Not to judge, but to be open to unexpected beauty, to everything that we do not know and about which we cannot speak.’