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Michelle Levy, Prologue, 10:07 min, 2024


My unfolding, iterative investigations  often have personal stakes. I find myself in multiple timelines simultaneously, racing to keep up as the story I am living and telling responds to discoveries, life, and world events. What was current is now the past. The story has already changed. It is a messy and complicated approach to art making. But it has also become my practice of living and making meaning.

 

The video, Prologue represents a recent moment in an unfolding story. My research to fill a void in my grandmother's history in Poland led to the discovery of the wartime survival account of a woman named Paulina and my obsessive and ultimately life-changing journey to Poland to research her story. Since 2017, I have been creating, performing, and sharing this story as it has unfolded.

Significant to this project is my collaboration with Patrycja Dołowy – featured in the video – a Polish Jewish artist/writer who translated Paulina's testimony, traveled with me to retrace Paulina's wartime path, and co-created with me a performance about our profound experience on the road.

I am now developing a nonfiction film that tells this story from a different perspective: how this investigation into the buried past became an unconventional exploration of motherhood. For Temp. Files, I created an experimental prologue to the film that contains the story’s emotional stakes, the broad strokes. I wanted to see what happens if I enter this story toward the end, in a moment of return, reflection, and tension toward its resolution, using two scenes that communicate metaphorically-- the search for a buried archive and the wait pregnancy results. A prologue that could also be an epilogue. 

For more about the PAULINA project and film:

Read "Who is the Real Paulina" - the first installment of the newly launched journal dedicated to the constellation of stories around Paulina.

Visit the PAULINA website: sheisalone.org



Temp. Files: Season 3: TRANSFORMATION is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).



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