"Homing: Returns of People, Places and Archive" Project

The project of the Center for Urban History "Homing: Returns of People, Places and Archive" in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut in Ukraine draws on the many experiences caused by the Second World War and addresses the themes of home, displacement, and return through critical archival studies, digital archiving, and public history. The project consists of two parts: digital archiving and public history. Together with researchers from various disciplines, we are exploring the role of the archive as a place of return and archiving as a practice. The archival component of the project focuses on the trajectories of five collections and the fates of their creators.

Włodzimierz Puchalski's archive is part of the Royal Museum in Niepołomice (Poland), but unlike his photographs of nature, his photographs of Lviv have long been neglected. Similarly, photographs of family life in Lviv and Przemyśl by photographer and UFOTO founder Stepan Dmochowski are kept at the Ukrainian Museum of Archives in the United States, where he ended up after World War II. Being in museum collections in other countries, these materials are inaccessible and almost unknown in Ukraine.

Three more collections are now in private hands in The Hague, Wrocław, and Paris. Marianne Dekker's collection shows the everyday life of Torez, Donetsk Oblast, the hometown of her mother Lydia, who was an Ostarbeiter. The collection of Witold Romer, a photographer from Lviv who is almost unknown in his hometown, which he left in 1939, preserves family moments as well as his attempts and experiments. Finally, Sofia Yablonska's collection of films and photographic negatives demonstrates a truly global geography. The photographer was born near Lviv, immigrated to Paris, spent the war in China and then in colonial French Indochina, and never returned. While her literary works are better known, her films and photographs have long remained inaccessible to the public.

The project also includes a public program "Domowroty / ПОВЕРНЕННЯ / Homing", which invites people to talk about three topics: photography and memory, home and return, and city and nature. The program highlights life stories and trajectories radically altered by the World War II, actualizing reflections on the ongoing process of physical and material return, as well as emotional and intellectual reflections on what constitutes place, belonging, and connection. By reflecting on the experience of war, past and present, we ask how we can recover lost voices and stories of the previous war and develop more complex narratives of the past. This will enable a more critical understanding of the present.

The program revolves around the exhibition "Domowroty / ПОВЕРНЕННЯ / Homing. Włodzimierz Puchalski" curated by Andrij Bojarov. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Center for Urban History and the Lviv Municipal Art Center, in partnership with the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Lviv and the Department of Culture of the Lviv City Council.

Credits

Cover Image: Panorama of Lviv // Włodzimierz Puchalski // collection of the Royal Museum in Niepołomice