Photography: © Nikoletta Monyok, 2019
Further information about Nikoletta Monyok’s work can be accessed here.
© JStadnicki 1995
During the 80s, grandfather had the habit of listening to Radio Free Europe on a crackling wireless which worked only if bashed about a few times. I understood very little of what was said in news bulletins and documentaries, but some words kept coming up in conversations he’d have with friends at the village pub. Over a couple of beers, it felt as if their banter about freedom, dictatorship, justice was a disguised form of perversity which made no sense to me at that time.
Even now, recollecting those Friday catch-ups, their invectives sound pointless, though I’ve tried numerous times to find out what they were actually upset about. It must have been in the mid 90s, after grandfather died, when searching through a pile of his old stuff I found this:
Modern dictatorships come about gradually through policies which limit the access to information, books, art, and support an education system reliant on overheads, statistical outcomes and hierarchical leagues. They emerge in communities that support equality and diversity while slowly reducing the means which offer disadvantaged people and their families the benefit of services with real impact to their lives.
Modern dictatorships embed themselves in services which monitor and limit freedom of speech, and flag out people who disagree (or have the potential to disagree) with official discourses; they also produce political directives to serve partisan interests, while dominating the public discourse with narratives designed to create fear and panic.
Modern dictatorships ask citizens to report friends, colleagues, neighbours, and scrutinise differences between people instead of promoting inclusion and common purpose; they also make people obsess over how bad things can be, when they should stimulate creativity and learning. If people are born equal, they should develop equally. This cannot happen when they are scared. There is no progress after punishment, just pain and bitterness.
© Maria Stadnicka 2020
Published in International Times on 1st February 2020.
© JStadnicki, Paris 2019
Technology and I are not on good terms as of late. Due to limited memory space, mobile apps keep freezing. Vodanex contacted me a few times already with updated offers then with sound advice which I politely requested to have mailed over. The experts suggest that my memory clutter is most probably coming from the BooksApp; too many pages left open in standby. The longest kept on the waiting list has been Is God Happy?* I flick through an essay on socialism which Leszek Kolakowski started at page fifty-eight and finished at sixty-four. My phone pings: Congratulations! Time for a break! You now reached your daily reading goal!
© Maria Stadnicka 2020
[From ‘Hermit Age’ sequence published in International Times on 25/01/2020.]
* Kolakowski, L. (2012) Is God Happy? Selected Essays, London: Penguin Modern Classics.
Photographs: © Maria Stadnicka, Stonehouse, 2019
On both sides of the frontline,
orchards in bloom.
People buy and sell goods,
occupy central squares,
dogs run after barefoot children
with grain baskets – linen flags.
Buses on schedule, taxis in queue.
Business as usual.
Gunshots, grenades, mortars.
Stray barks come out of houses
with blown-up windows. Splinters
rising – morning’s canines.
Soldiers wake up to the call to prayer,
switch radio on, shave by the roadside.
Nametags rest in shoe polish tins,
heat bakes bread already sliced.
Buses carry wounded further inland.
Poem published in Sweat, Ink and Tears, 8th Jan. 2019, available here.
©Maria Stadnicka, 2019
Photograph: ‘Air – 2018’, ©JStadnicki, 2018
to Robin Wheeler
…………………………………………
I saw a man leaving a water glass
at a junction where the elm tree,
he used to know,
had been suddenly cut down.
…………………………………………
©Maria Stadnicka, 2018
Photography: ©John Stadnicki, 2018
‘It is unfortunately hard to recall our quasi-permanent concern with the future, for on our return from a place, perhaps the first thing to disappear from memory is just how much of the past we spent dwelling on what was to come; how much of it, that is, we spent somewhere other than where we were.’ (de Botton, 2002)
Photography: ©John Stadnicki, 2018
Study I, 2018
Study II, 2018
Study IV, 2018
Study III, 2018
Study VI, 2018
Study V, 2018
Photography: ©John Stadnicki, 2018
Maria Stadnicka 