Agata Ciastoń (Poland)
Die Glatzer Rose
Die Glatzer Rose is a visual-textual book project focused on Krzyżana Góra, a residential area in Kłodzko (formerly Glatz), where my grandparents settled after WWII. The estate was built in the 1920s, when the city was still part of Germany, and was later repopulated by Poles after the displacement of its German residents. My family’s house, with its preserved prewar furniture, objects, and structure, became the emotional and imaginative center of my childhood – filled with textures, scents, and silences that bore traces of someone else’s life. As a child, I searched for clues: postcards in a foreign language, photos of strangers, beads hidden in the cracks of the wooden floor. The tension between absence and inheritance shaped my early understanding of history.
The project aims to explore the entangled history of Krzyżana Góra as a microcosm of postwar Central Europe, where personal memory and geopolitical violence intersect. Through archival photographs, official documents, private materials, and stories from former and current residents, I want to reflect on the layered nature of place – and on what remains unspoken or overlooked in institutional accounts.
The outcome will be a visual-textual book composed of essays, photographic materials, and reflective fragments. The work will draw on both public archives and private collections, as well as press and municipal sources. I will focus on how intimate objects and minor gestures can reveal overlooked dimensions of displacement and continuity.
The project continues my ongoing research into archives, memory, and place, as developed in my recent book In the Middle Lane, the Grass Was Tall in the Summer (2024), where I explored the history of the A4 motorway as a layered site of historical trauma and cultural forgetting. Die Glatzer Rose brings this method closer to my own story – returning to the house, the hill, the streets that once formed the whole world of my childhood.
Agata Ciastoń is a freelance curator, researcher, and author with a PhD in cultural studies. Her work explores borders, territories, and memory, often through archival materials and visual narratives. She has collaborated with numerous cultural and publishing institutions, curating group exhibitions such as “Poetry and Performance. The Eastern European Perspective” (2020) and “Fotografia Magazine 1953–1974” (2017), alongside multiple solo shows. In 2024, her long-term research on the A4 motorway in Lower Silesia, Poland – originally built by the Third Reich – resulted in a book and exhibition exploring the reactivation of difficult archives. She also co-developed and led a Polish–Norwegian residency program for underrepresented artists, supporting them from concept to exhibition. Her projects often explore such recurrent issues as ambiguous landscapes and the relationship between humans and the world of animals, plants, and things.
