Beyond the Past and the Present; Bytom
The presented images were created by superimposing two photographs: one from the city’s archive and another taken today, in the same or as close as possible to the same location. The result of this encounter is a series of collages in which old postcards, photographs of streets, tenement houses, squares, and urban fragments of Bytom collide with the city’s present-day image.
Bytom appears here as a multilayered city — at once monumental and fragile, industrial and intimate, historical and marked by the consequences of rapid transformation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was one of the important economic centres of Upper Silesia, developing through mining, metallurgy, railways, trade, and intensive urbanization. The wealth of that period left behind an extensive urban structure, representative tenement houses, public buildings, and traces of former metropolitan ambition.
The later history of Bytom, however, is also a history of exploitation, mining damage, post-war social shifts, industrial monoculture, and, eventually, a painful collapse. The decline of the Polish People’s Republic, the transformation of the 1990s, and the following decades brought the closure of industrial plants, the degradation of parts of the urban fabric, the depopulation of the city centre, and fractures within the city’s material and social tissue.
Bartolomeo Koczenasz’s collages do not reconstruct Bytom as a nostalgic image of lost splendour. Rather, they attempt to capture a moment of suspension: between former power and contemporary ambiguity, between document and imagination, between the memory of a place and its present-day experience. The archival images are not confined to the past — they permeate contemporary photographs, revealing continuity, damage, displacement, and the city’s ambiguous persistence.
The project emerged from photographic research, work with archival postcards and publications, and contemporary photographic documentation of Bytom. The works were produced using RISO printing, whose layered character and slight print misalignments further emphasize the overlapping of times, images, and urban histories.
“Beyond the Past and the Present; Bytom” is another chapter in a series developed by the artist across different cities. This time, the focus turns to Bytom — a city that resists simple narratives of decline or revitalization. It is a space in which the past does not disappear, the present cannot be easily ordered, and the image of the city emerges precisely in between.
Funding information
The project “Beyond the Past and the Present; Bytom” was created as part of the undertaking “City in Transformation. From Archive to Collage. Creating a New Series of Collages Based on Archival Photographs of Bytom and Developing Creative and Promotional Tools”, implemented with support from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
The aim of the undertaking was to develop artistic and digital skills and to create a new series of collages based on archival photographs of Bytom.
Amount of support: PLN 36,000.00.
Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
Exhibition documentation
Photographic documentation of the solo exhibition “Beyond the Past and the Present; Bytom”, presented at the Centre for Contemporary Art Wiewiórka in Kraków.
The exhibition presented a series of RISO-printed collages based on archival photographs and postcards of Bytom, combined with contemporary photographs taken in the same or corresponding locations. The works explored the overlapping layers of the city’s history, its industrial past, urban transformation, and the tension between memory and the present-day image of Bytom.
The exhibition was part of the project “City in Transformation. From Archive to Collage”, developed with support from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.