A! is a project in which I’m looking for traces of antique culture in Polish household.
I’m interested in finding references in architecture and popular culture which are the result of contemporary interpretation of antiquity’s output. My inspiration is great Polish fantasy manifesting itself in diversity and originality of ideas, mainly in the field of area development. In my documentary I present the flood of buildings and objects bearing reference to antiquity but having a totally different function. It iis targeted at showing how they are interpreted in contemporary Poland in which for obvious reasons there is no monumental evidence of antique culture of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and exhibiting how we use their potential. I’d like to show that today, when antique culture knowledge is no longer the basis of our education or a door to a better life, we create objects detached from classical patterns which were reinterpreted for centuries and now have at their source memories from our holidays in Greece or films about Cleopatra.
I’m interested in „popantiquity”, roadside architecture, loose associations and whatever people in Poland remember, like, cultivate that comes from antiquity. Traditional antique culture is retreating and we are attacked by its twin sister transformed by popculture. It is the one which builds hotels shaped like pyramids or gives birth to Trojan horses standing by the roads. They are what I’m looking for.
Tomasz Łaptaszyński (1982), Polish photographer based in Lodz. For years connected with film industry; worked on animated films and photographed film sets. A climber himself, he deals professionally with climbing photography. His works were published in multiple sport magazines which appreciated his unposed attitude towards climbers’ images. History studies led him to focusing his interests on relations between past and photography, particularly reception of past cultures in the contemporary world.
