Place is a space endowed with meaning.

Yalta Conference of 1945 completely reshaped the political order of Central Europe. Two cities, Breslau of the Third German Reich and Lwow of the Second Polish Republic found themselves in new countries. Borders of the three countries moved westwards, pushing the old populations out, and forcing the new in. This violent act of repatriation had no concern for the lives of the individual. Scars of these events are still visible, both in the cultural composition of these nations and in the urban tissue of cities which fell victim to the brutal transition. The transplantation of the majority of the population of Lwow into Breslau, alongside many national institutions, has created an unprecedented historical and emotional parallel between these cities.

The very memory of the war and the perceived fragility of the constructed order resulted in a phenomenon of simultaneous resentment towards the new environment and mythical idealisation of the past left behind. Authorities instantly began reformulating history into a narrative that would suit the new political agenda. This resulted in a systematic erasure of traces of the former inhabitants; one example of this process was the widespread action of removal and covering of inscriptions on buildings in a foreign language, names of institutions, streets and local businesses. Breslau through Polonisation became Wroclaw, and Lwow became Ukrainian Lviv.

As new reality was shaped by the selective distribution of memory, national and local powers carefully administrated fragmented history and reformulated it in service of strengthening new national myths. People expelled carried with them fragments of their beloved cities captured in personal artefacts, items big enough to carry a meaning, small enough to be taken on a train. The overarching sentiment was, however, that only if they could, they would have taken the city itself. This parallels the custom of the Grand Tour, where in the 18th and 19th centuries upper-class young men would travel through Europe to arrive in Italy, often to return home with a plaster cast of ancient’s building detail, a peculiar postcard from antiquity.

Postcards serve as vessels of memory, their format and lightness reduce friction to a minimum and offer an ease of connection. Memory, however, can sometimes be a burden. The inconceivable collective trauma forced upon people displaced from their cities has been imprinted on their psyche and became impossible to erase. People were forced to make do and adapt to the new reality, yet the memory of painful events and that of the cherished past followed them everywhere they went. The project tries to reflect on trauma and the absurdity of displacement, but also to convey the idea of a burden of memory. A cast model of a section of the facade of the Royal Palace of Prussian Kings in Breslau, which was destroyed during the war and intentionally omitted during reconstruction has been inscribed with a fragment of the poem “Report From The Besieged City” written by Lwowian poet Z. Herbert. Merging memory of both cities, the project is conceived as a postcard from Lemberg, a place that geographically lies somewhere between the two, yet physically it exists only in the ephemeral. The model retains the typical postcard ratio of 3x4, but its mass and size render itself completely impractical. Documented in a series of photographs in the urban context which emphasise its cumbersomeness and the persistent presence of experienced trauma. It is an epitaph to the past and a reminder that a painful memory can follow us like a scar.