VERTIGO

VERTIGOZAWRÓTGŁOWY is a contemplative film work that delves into the layered identity of Łódź, Poland—a city shaped by the forces of capitalism, migration, and artistic imagination. Once hailed as the "Promised Land," Łódź grew rapidly in the 19th century as a textile empire built mainly through the labor and enterprise of its multicultural populace, with the Jewish community playing a central role in its cultural and economic development. Before the devastation of the Holocaust, Łódź was home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, whose contributions remain inscribed in the fabric of the city, though often obscured by time and loss.

Through the silent lens of a flâneur, VERTIGOZAWRÓTGŁOWY reexamines this haunted topography. The camera roams the architectural upper margins of the city: the neglected yet expressive cornices of tenement buildings, the echoes of grandeur that once defined the urban landscape. In doing so, the film captures not only the physical diversity of the built environment but also the fractured historical narrative that clings to its surfaces.

The project draws inspiration from the writings of Maria Kornatowska, legendary Łódź Film School lecturer and critic, who saw in Łódź a mirror of New York: two cities born of industrial ambition, shaped by waves of immigration, and marked by aesthetic incoherence that speaks of human striving rather than imposed order. Kornatowska’s fascination with these urban twins is channeled into the film’s visual rhythm, where architectural fragments become cinematic brushstrokes, revealing a city as disjointed and poetic as the people who once animated it. 

In contrast to Bruce Baillie’s All My Life, a 1966 American experimental film where a slow pan across a sunlit fence ends in a flourish of color and sound, VERTIGOZAWRÓTGŁOWY unfolds in silence. There is no Ella Fitzgerald here, only the absence left behind by history. The flowers do not bloom; they have long since withered. The silence here is not emptiness, but a reverent space in which the lost voices of the city’s Jewish past may still resonate.

VERTIGOZAWRÓTGŁOWY invites viewers to contemplate Łódź not only as a geographic site but as a psychological and cinematic landscape—a place where memory lingers in architecture, and where the dreams and disillusionments of modernity reflect each other in a mirror of cracked glass. 

2015
Single-channel video, 43 minutes, looped, unique object, dimensions variable.
Muzeum Sztuki ms1, Łódź, Poland