From the series Backyard Diaries © Nikita Teryoshin
Fotofestiwal Łódź celebrates its 25th anniversary with an edition reflecting on animals and our relationship with them, in a still-radical approach to photographic works
When a one-month-old piglet was abandoned at an airport security checkpoint in south-west China, an employee decided to come to its rescue. He Ling took the piglet home to her 30th floor apartment, in the futuristic cityscape of Chengdu, which she shared with a family of animal adoptees – including five cats, a large parrot – and her husband, the photographer Feng Li. Since that day, nine years ago, the lucky piglet has grown to become a 100kg boar who, despite his size, happily coexists with the rest of the clan (now relocated to a larger ground-floor property in the suburbs), unbothered by his growing fame as an informal muse to the now-celebrated photographer.
This is just the kind of story that appeals to Krzysztof Candrowicz, the enigmatic co-founder of Fotofestiwal Łódź, who has a Little Prince tattoo on his left arm as a reminder “to never actually grow up”, as he once put it. “Pig is a very touching story that asks basic questions about which species we choose to domesticate and which species we treat as livestock, and how we build very close family relationships with each other [man and animal],” Candrowicz tells BJP.
The series is one of several projects presented in We, Animals, the main exhibition at this year’s Fotofestiwal in one of Poland’s biggest cities, part of a wider programme exploring how our sense of humanity is mirrored in our relationship with the animal world. It will be presented “in dialogue” with Backyard Diaries by Nikita Teryoshin, says Marta Szymańska, who has been with the festival since the early days, and who is part of the four-strong programming team. The Berlin-based Russian photographer depicts the feral lives of urban cats as a sort of antidote to the glamourpusses of Instagram, but also to highlight resilience in the face of the gentrification of our major cities. “These two projects are very simple, but together they create a kind of reflection,” says Szymańska.
“These two projects are very simple, but together they create a kind of reflection” – Marta Szymańska
The exhibition at Art_Inkubato, a former cotton warehouse, aims to show how animals have been commodified, “inviting us to look again – critically and with tenderness”, a curatorial statement explains, in order to “open new pathways for coexistence”. Among the diverse artistic approaches to the theme is Maija Tammi’s Octomom, which includes video footage of an octopus in the Pacific Ocean, brooding over her eggs for an astonishing 53 months, with a postpartum self-portrait of the artist. I’ll Bet the Devil My Head, Carlos Alba’s study of London’s wild foxes and their evening-time coexistence with commuting city workers, is intended as a metaphor for economic disparity. And Richard Barnes’ Animal Logic looks at the unsettling paradox of natural history museums, that “to observe nature so closely, we must first subdue and dismantle it”, says Fotofestiwal.
Elsewhere, Luke Stephenson’s An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds will be given a prominent outdoor display. The festival will provide a platform to exiled Belarusian artists, including Sasha Velichko, winner of the Fotofestiwal Grant for her work Called to the Carpet, which concerns female political prisoners in her home country. There will be a Polish debut for Philip Montgomery and his observations on political fracture in the US, while Augustin Rebetez, who combines photography, sculpture, drawing, music and performance in his chaotic installations, will take up residence in the grand Alfred Biedermann Palace.
The palace is a new venue for the 25-year-old festival, as is Fujza, a former power station and Art Nouveau relic of Karol Scheibler’s textile empire, now repurposed as part of a major mixed-use revitalisation project. But then the festival has long discovered and repurposed buildings to serve as exhibition spaces. Founded in 2001 by a group of students in Łódź working across sociology, the art academy and the city’s famed film school, Fotofestiwal emerged in a landscape in which, as Candrowicz recalls, “there was almost nothing”. The first edition was resolutely DIY, involving films screened from VHS tapes and displays assembled by cutting photographs out of books – “super punk!” he says.
The city itself was a determining factor. A decade earlier, the collapse of the textile industry had left Łódź with abandoned factories and widespread unemployment. By the early 2000s, conditions were ripe for ad-hoc cultural experimentation. The festival’s early editions occupied post-industrial sites, their scale and roughness shaping both the presentation of work and the social experience around it. Within a few years, the programme had expanded across the city, supported by the university, municipal structures and an emerging international network. Its development was never entirely stable. The directors speak of “permanent crisis management”, which persists even as the festival has grown in scale and recognition. What has remained consistent is a commitment to building infrastructure where there was none, including systems of exchange and support.
Looking back, Szymańska describes her cohort as “the first free generation in Poland”, able to travel, to connect internationally, and to imagine new forms of cultural production in the wake of the 1990s. Yet both directors resist turning this story into a fixed narrative. The 25th anniversary will be celebrated, but more as a moment of gathering than reflection. A quarter-century on, Fotofestiwal remains less an institution than a process, collaborative, and still open to change.
