Zuza Banasińska

Grandmaauntsistercat is created with materials from the Polish Educational Archive and tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems.

Originally created as didactic and propagandist tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a locus of auto-fictional memories, with their scientific register shifted towards a treatment of images themselves as specimens. The women in the family find home within a selective area of the archive, engaging in a process of self- and world-making, endeavoring to construct themselves as subjects within a society that relentlessly objectifies them. Exploring kinship positions within the family, the child shapes their own identity, while striving to avoid reproducing the systems that shaped it.