Family Tales

Family Tales (2022) is a project focused on ancestry search, rediscovering author’s family archives and interpreting stories by combining archival photographic materials with historic and experimental photographic processes from gum bichromate to wet collodion, chlorophyll printing on leaves from the Kuca family hometown to photographic installation.

Through a range of printing materials and by reworking collected stories on childhood, sickness, and marriage from family members, it reflects timeless familial relationships. Materials were gathered during visits to Poland over the years of the author living abroad and the project was put together in the UK.

Grandma does not recognise me anymore. The author’s auto-portrait consists of re-photographed glass wet collodion plates, 18x24 cm each, shot in a large format below the camera. Animated with a voice-over of the author's grandmother speaking in a rural dialect. Voice-over translation: “I don’t see and I do not know anything anymore. I am missing someone, and feeling lonely. An empty house is falling on me, making me turn upside down. I don’t know where I am anymore. Are you leaving me?”

Part of the Family Tales series physically exists as 6 separate glass plate stills, 2022.

Magda Kuca is part of »Guest Room: Varun Gupta & Arpan Mukherjee«.

Check out her Artist Feature “The Grandmothers”.