"Oxytocin Killed My Shoes", 2023

Ilford100 print on photo porcelain, 9 x 12 cm each plate

Photographs of all my pairs of shoes that stopped fitting me after childbirth. 

The shoes were buried during a performative burial, a ritualistic micro-funeral in a self-dug grave at Grobla in Wrocław.

A ritual for anyone wishing to say goodbye to something, pay homage to someone or something that has passed. Because not expressing myself hurts.

"Okay. By week 12 of pregnancy, the levels of body-relaxing hormones - relaxin and oxytocin - increase. They have a relaxing effect on the ligaments and tendons mentioned above. Interestingly, you can tell from the foot whether a woman was pregnant or not. And this is a structure, a change that most often does not return to its original state after pregnancy."

What else has not returned to its original state? And what is this state really?

Are change and death not paradoxically the most constant and certain states?

And if so, why do we pay them so little attention?

The death of my former self, my shoes, and then my father.

They awakened in me the need to create personal rites of passage.

Quoting Katarzyna Dorota, an educator at the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow:

"Such pivotal moments in life that clearly divide our reality into past and future require special care.

I believe that consciously experiencing a moment of change helps to stand in the center of one's power and feel the strength of one's agency."

This project was initially supposed to be about my shoes, but observing the traditional, unfamiliar Muslim burial of my father, from a distance determined by my gender,

I felt something difficult to define - dissatisfaction, anger, opposition, rage. A craving for some completion, the possibility of closing a certain chapter, bidding farewell on my own terms.