Letting a picture hung by the previous owners stay where they had originally placed it, preserving a knife excavated in a house garden or displaying glasses which were put away for years, boxed and stored in an attic – what all these practices have in common is the underlying idea that these things belong in their surrounding space, that the two are mutually integral.
Many individuals feel that objects should be left undisturbed and that intruding upon the original order would infringe upon the house’s spatial integrity, identity, and history.
Broken knife (excavated in a house garden in Zalesie, Wrocław)
Wrocław
courtesy of Krzysztof Maciejewski
In the 1990s, Krzysztof Maciejewski and his parents moved into an apartment located in an old villa in the Wrocław district of Zalesie. In the apartment and its surroundings they found many objects belonging to previous owners. “I do not know who has left these things for us” – Krzysztof declares referring to the objects’ mostly unclear provenance. A broken knife which Krzysztof excavated in the garden and decided to keep likely dates to prewar Wrocław.