In collaboration with Adriana Molenda
16 mm film, 24', 2023
16 mm film, 24', 2023
Exhibition text:
This film was shot at the Rusałka Lake in the summer of 2022. The camera used was a Zeiss Ikon Movikon 16, produced in the second half of the 1930s in Germany. The actual camera used for the film was manufactured in 1938. During World War II, this type of camera was often used by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to document events and gather intelligence. Such a camera was also secretly brought in and used by the Jewish citizens in the Krakow ghetto.
This film was shot at the Rusałka Lake in the summer of 2022. The camera used was a Zeiss Ikon Movikon 16, produced in the second half of the 1930s in Germany. The actual camera used for the film was manufactured in 1938. During World War II, this type of camera was often used by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to document events and gather intelligence. Such a camera was also secretly brought in and used by the Jewish citizens in the Krakow ghetto.
If film documentation of the construction of the Rusałka Lake in Poznan had existed, this type of camera would have likely been used. However, such film documentation does not exist, or we know nothing about it.
Rusałka (“Water Nymph” in Polish) is an artificial lake of nearly 37 hectares created during the Third Reich occupation of Poznań, Poland. Now it’s one of the main summer sites inside the city, surrounded by a forest park and recreational facilities. Nazi Germany developed the Rusałka Lake project, along with a series of promenades, while still preparing for the invasion of Poland.
For its construction, the occupation authorities used camp prisoners from several organized nearby labor camps, mainly Jews and POWs, thousands of whom lost their lives there. The German administration used tombstones from the nearby Jewish cemeteries to strengthen some parts of the lake bottom and its banks. The forest park became a site of mass executions.