Martynka Wawrzyniak

Polish emigrant—Martynka—living for 15 years in Manhattan, divorces her American husband and decides to look for her new home in Greenpoint. This is a district that reminds her of folksy Polish people and the type of emigrants she does not want to identify with. However now she realizes that the longing for the family draws her just here. Moreover, the district is changing into an intercultural melting pot and this is the last moment to taste life among her fellow Polish people. Martynka makes contact with people who came to New York 20, 30 years ago, completely unprepared for the reality overseas. Her neighbor, Henryk, becomes her friend and helper in difficult times. Helena—an elderly lady living in a senior home—inspires her to create an artistic project. Martynka listens to stories of determination, loneliness, fear, but also stories of finding their place on foreign ground as she deals with her own past, hoping to overcome the feeling of loneliness and alienation in New York.

Ziemia (“Earth” in Polish) is a public art project created by artist Martynka Wawrzyniak in collaboration with the Greenpoint, community. The project takes the form of a ceramic orb atop a meadow in McGolrick Park, which will be unveiled in June 2018. The orb is glazed with a mixture of clay excavated in Greenpoint and soils from around the world contributed by residents. The artist spent two years reaching out to fellow Greenpointers to invite them to gather soil from locations symbolically representative of their identity. This film is an abbreviated version of a film which documents Wawrzyniak’s journey to Poland in August 2017 to collect soil on behalf of Polish seniors and undocumented immigrants who were unable to personally collect the soil themselves. This film and the fabrication of the ceramic orb were made possible by the generous support of The Polish Cultural Institute in New York.