During her residency with Art27scotland Marta ventured to explore the existence within the migrant community of Poles living in Edinburgh. Glasgow-based herself Marta travelled to Edinburgh weekly to lead the informal meet-ups and the linocut workshops. During these meetings she talked to the participants and recorded the interviews starting from the conversations from the concept of 'home’. ‘Polish Voices’ is a sound piece created by Marta using interviews with the members of the Polish community during the workshops. explore an existence within an ‘immigrant reality’ as a form of political statement. She has been interested in hearing voices that wouldn’t normally be heard, from people who pave the way simply by the act of existing in a certain environment.
During the residency, Marta worked close with other artist in residence Robert Motyka and they created the final art work together combining sound and animation of the participants’ prints.
February 2022
As part of the art residency with Art27scotland, Marta Adamowicz led her first art walk on Saturday, 26 February 2022, at 1 pm.
The participants met at Southside Community Centre 117 Nicolson Street, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9ER. The 20-minute walk across The Meadows took the group to Bruntsfield Links – to General Maczek’s path located there. It was an excellent occasion to combine Polish history in the city with a creative and fun activity (1-hour duration). The participants searched for interesting textures and surfaces to trace and print. The artworks were later used in further creative actions during the project as the backgrounds for the linocut architectural designs.
March 2022
March 2022 saw the first of the series of linocut workshops led my Marta under the title: Architecture of the Heart. The main premise of the project was the idea that the buildings that surround us are part of our identity. They can evoke different feelings: nostalgia, yearning and love. Artist led the participants through the process of creating a linocut depicting one’s favourite building – a symbol of little homeland – past or present.
April 2022
The linocut workshops continued throughout April. The new participants joined and all worked on their projects.
As April is Autism Acceptance Month Marta invited the audience to listen to her sound documentary on Saturday 23 April to gain a rare insight into the private world of a mother’s journey, with her autistic son, who is engrossed and soothed by the sound and motion of the Glasgow Subway and its trains.
“The Boy Who Watched Trains” is an audio documentary. The broadcast is 24 minutes long: the time it takes to complete one full-circle journey on the Glasgow Subway. Marta Adamowicz invites the listener on a journey, both in time and place, to the intimate world of a mother and son, who live in Glasgow.
The modern world is full of noise that, for autistic people, it is a frightening and unpredictable place. Everyday situations can be terrifying, overwhelming, and extremely daunting for an autistic child. They can spend their whole life trying to self-regulate the chaos of unprocessed stimuli, in their inner and outer worlds. This boy’s daily subway routine with his mother, in Glasgow Subway’s Inner and Outer Circle, builds a bridge between his inner and outer world, and builds one too, between the mother and son: as they learn from one another on their journey together in life.
The story of a mother and son who have coped on their journey with the assistance of what the Glasgow Subway offers to a child fascinated and dependant on its trains: their multi-layered sounds, repetition, motion, predictability, and security. The artist, therefore, hopes too, that other families perhaps isolated and confused by a similar diagnosis, can learn to look to their own future with similar positivity as they embark on their journey.
There was an engaging Q&A session after the presentation of the audio documentary.
May 2022 – June 2022
The spring months were a production part of the residency. Collating the prints, designing the final display, and editing the audio piece, closely collaborating with Robert Motyka.
July 2022
The first stage of the residency was presented on 2 July 2022 in Southside Community Centre.
‘City of Homes’ is an audio-visual artwork – an outcome of residency by Marta Adamowicz and Robert Motyka. Artists have set out to work with the Polish community in Edinburgh to invoke a discussion and collect accounts of the immigrant experience and to establish if a connection exists between architectural structures and the concept of ‘home’.
They edited images and interviews with participants into a spectacular experience where sound and animation tell very personal stories of migration and belonging.
The artworks (linocut prints and collages) created during the series of workshops with the artists will be shown during the exhibition opening on the night before the premiere screening.
The evening was finalised with the performance from Edinburgh’s own Eastern European Folk Music Ensemble DAVNO – a female collective bringing the unique traditional sounds of the region to Scotland.