Keczupowo (PL for Ketchuptown)
by Natalia Majchrzak
This project can be seen this year at Circulation(s), which takes place from March 21 to May 17 in Paris, France. The full program is available here.
Keczupowo (or “Ketchup Town” in English) is the nickname of Włocławek, Natalia Majchrzak’s town of birth, which she has regularly visited since childhood, as she lives in Belgium. The film translates the mixed feelings she experiences on her visits, between nostalgia and alienation. Using theatricality and fiction, the artist highlights the subjectivity of her memories, which she tries to recreate in the Belgian region with characters acted by her relatives and friends. In this way, she expresses her current life and her background, questioning both her sense of belonging and memory’s instability. The altering of motifs and objects – such as the trzepak, a structure originally used to beat rugs in Poland, but in her memory, a key object when playing as a child — reinforces this dialogue between past, present and future while becoming a tool to keep things at a distance.
For Circulation(s), Natalia, in collaboration with the painter Sarah Buniowski, developed a mural installation based on Włocławek earthenware, examining the city’s identity mixing tradition with collective and personal memory.
