“Nobody told people openly: listen, things are bad, but you need to prepare yourselves, because they are going to get even worse.”

Why My Parents Have Never Been to Greece began as an attempt to give attention to a generation that felt left behind by Poland’s post-1989 transformation-people who worked hard, sacrificed, and saw little material benefit in return. I wanted to record my parents’ memories of that period: work, faith, family obligations, the slow accumulation of disappointment. I believed that even a difficult conversation could bring people closer, and that this - rather than the political distance between us - would become the project’s subject.

The process didn’t go as planned. As the interviews continued, something in my parents’ relationship to their own past began to shift, and with it, their relationship to me. What started as an act of listening gradually became a confrontation - one that culminated, unexpectedly, during a family gathering, when years of unspoken tension surfaced directly.

The project, as it exists today, no longer documents reconciliation. It documents the difficulty - at times the impossibility - of communication across a widening divide, and the way inherited disappointment can calcify into positions that leave little room for dialogue. Combining photographs, family archives, and recorded conversations, the work follows three homes - my mother’s, my father’s, and my own - as a way of tracing what is passed between generations: not only memory, but distance.

The title refers to an unrealized possibility - a life postponed by circumstance, a lightness my parents never had access to. What began as a project about listening has become, instead, a document of what remains unheard.

Developed during the Sputnik Photos Mentoring Programme 2025/2026.