Locusts, by Joseph Constable

This text accompanies the artwork locusts by Grzegorz Stefański. The artwork is the outcome of the Imperial War Museums and Art School Plus collaboration. 

Text by: Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions, De La Warr Pavilion

In his seminal publication on the purported effects of trauma on the body, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk draws attention to the notion of imprinting. One of the most important things that we have learned about trauma, he says, is that it 

'is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganisation of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think’. 1

Psychological imprints have a tendency to layer and linger around certain sites. Through the idiosyncratic prism of memory, the lived experiences of people continue to permeate the bricks and mortar that make up our built environments. Architecture is as much a vehicle of historical trauma, as are the delicate architectures of our minds and bodies that carry certain memories from the past to the present.

Artist filmmaker, Grzegorz Stefański’s new film, locusts – the second part of a triptych, the first created in Tokyo in 2023 - sits at this nexus of bodily, psychological and spatial memory. Commissioned by the IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund in partnership with The Brickworks Museum, located in the village of Swanwick, Southampton, locusts brings together real-life testimonies from the local community about the Second World War and its aftermath within this part of England, whilst exploring the potential for individual and collective healing through processes of recollection and re-enactment.

As an artist whose practice frequently incorporates choreography, Stefański has created an 8-minute film that provides an important voice to communities that have been directly affected by conflict through the intimate performances of two participants – a father and a daughter. Throughout the work, we encounter these two characters locked in intimate gestures, actions, and stances: sleeping, dreaming, holding, supporting, hiding, swimming, drowning, and building. In tandem with their physical movements, fragments of recorded testimonies from local residents are vocalised through lip synchronisations. In this, we witness the surreal activation of past recollections as they are re-enacted in the present. These words, often poignant in tone and content, become disembodied from their speakers and conjoined with the cathartic energy expressed by the movements of otherwise mute performers.

Stefański’s decision to work with a father and daughter for this work perhaps speaks to the ability of trauma to be passed on to later generations, be it through storytelling, memory, or more physiological manifestations. Notably, it is the daughter rather than the father who vocalises the testimonies throughout the film, which reinforces the potential of ancestral imprinting across time. One of the film’s most striking scenes is captured underwater, where we see these two bodies swimming towards one another, holding and supporting the other in an attempt to move towards the dappling light of the water’s surface. The quality of water and what it engenders – slow, thick movements, fragmented sounds, and blurred perception – is here an apt visual metaphor for the delicate and fragile nature of trauma and the myriad ways that memories can rise to the surface of consciousness.

The fragility of space and its interrelation with memory is another important focus of the film, which connects to the history of The Brickworks Museum and the key part that it played in the rebuilding of Southampton after the Second World War. Physical traces within buildings can become triggers of past events, with often the most inconsequential imprints bearing unspoken significance. In one of the testimonies quoted within the film, we hear a voice recount how ‘there was a mark on this parquet floor, a stain, and when we asked about it, we were told “oh, don’t worry about that, just forget it, don’t ask about it, and that I assumed was bl-”’. Abruptly cut off before the voice finishes the word presumed to be ‘blood’, Stefański editorial cropping of sound highlights the fact that trauma is often as much about what is not communicated in certain moments, as what is.

The fact that this particular voice was told not to ask about this stain, to put it out of their mind, similarly speaks to the unconscious impulse to try to forget, to bury certain memories within the past, for fear of how they might come back to haunt the present. locusts thus dwells in the complex space between fear and forgetting, and how often the instinct to rebuild over rather than work through painful memories can take precedent over the latter. In this way, the film can be understood as an attempt to work through what might not have previously been explored, to aid a healing process that involves the individual and the collective.

In commenting on the context that this new work addresses, Stefański astutely notes how ‘we are living in times that do not offer much space to heal, as historical traumas are constantly being triggered by contemporary conflict’. The unfortunate fact of our modern-day experience is that it is suffused with past and present trauma, such that a survivalist mode of operating becomes the modus operandi in order to protect oneself and navigate a world of continuous warring. Through its meditative filmic movements, locusts asks us to slow down and make space for memories that still resonate in and around a place. It is only through these acts of space-making and slowness that the ongoing work of healing can begin.

Throughout the film, the two characters are pictured gathering pieces of wood, gradually coming together in a dark open forest space to create a protective enclosure. It is a provisional and precarious piece of architecture, but nevertheless it is a shelter that protects the father and daughter in the film’s penultimate picturing of healing embrace. Rather than leave things there, Stefański ends the work with the daughter alone, walking stridently forward away from the protective enclosure. It is a moment of individual agency and forward motion that is much a symbol of hope, as it is a breaking free of painful memories which have a tendency to repeat themselves.

1. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma, 2014. London: Penguin Books, p. 24.Page of 2 2