In 1946, Burkhard Schittny’s mother was driven westward from Klodzko, now in Poland, as part of the “Operacja Jaskółka.” Only ten years old at the time, she left her hometown as a refugee in a cattle car and set out on a seven-day journey.

The video, based on the chronologically arranged 10,361 film stills from Schittny’s photo project “Alte Heimat. Neue Heimat” (Old Homeland. New Homeland), for which the artist traveled the same route almost 70 years later, recalls this journey: a trip into the unknown, whose loud soundtrack evokes violence and war just as much as the dimly flickering, staccato sequences from the moving train do. The images recorded today remain inextricably linked to the past, but they refer just as much to current political events, to powerlessness, flight and the trauma of displacement in the 21st century.

“Operacja Jaskółka” was the name of a British-Polish agreement to resettle Germans after the end of World War 2. The Polish word “Jaskółka” means a swallow: a migratory bird that will not return after all.

Burkhard Schittny. Born in 1966. Lives in Hamburg. Studied in Bremen and London. Master of Fine Arts degree. From 2010 he devoted himself to the theme of power, in particular the wartime political abuse of power and the resulting influence on society, from which the group of works “Legacy Projects” was formed. Schittny’s artistic repertoire includes photography, video, sound, performance, installation, and text-based embossed/photographic works.

schittny.de
instagram.com/schittny

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