Book presentation (EN)
Alexander, Michał Siarek
3.06 (Sunday), 16.00
Festival Centre (Tytano)
Participants: Michał Siarek, Brad Feuerhelm
If countries were theatre genres, the Republic of Macedonia would be an operetta. It would even have the perfect backdrop: the city of Skopje, which also serves as the nation’s capital.
Michał Siarek’s Alexander documents the brief but stormy history of attempts to carve out a new national mythology to unite this ethnically and religiously divided Balkan country. The populist Macedonian government, trying to mask its passivity in the face of real challenges, made a symbolic gesture: a politics of history that makes a breakneck leap from contemporary Slavonic Macedonia to the ancient Alexander the Great.
Siarek juxtaposes two aspects of this myth-making effort—one is the architectural reconstruction of Skopje to conform with the policy of antiquity, giving the modernist buildings quasi-ancient facades, and the other is the unexpected collapse of the populist political project through the leaking of wiretapped conversations showing the politicians’ true motivations.
Michał Siarek (b. 1991) is a documentary photographer, a student of the photography faculty of Łódź Film School. His debut project, Alexander, on which he has been working since 2013, will be first shown in public in its entirety at the exhibition at Instytut Fotografii Fort in May 2018. Siarek’s awards include the New East Photo Prize (London), BZWBK Press Photo, and the Fidal Youth Photography Award(France).
144+20 pages
43 plates
207×263 mm
Munken Lynx 150gsm
hard cover
hand-coloured and waxed edges
Self-published in the edition of 750 copies, including 200 copies with limited cover (pre-orders only) and 30+3AP in portfolio edition.
All pre-ordered copies are signed.
Designed by Olga Łacna / IFF
