SISTER

Words by Jacek Klowskowki.

In March 2022, my sister passed away due to surgery for a brain tumor. She did not live to see her 40th birth- day. Shortly after, in an attempt to cope with the overwhelming grief, I decided to start a photography project. However, I had no idea where it would lead me.

Beyond the undeniable emptiness left by my sister’s absence, I began to feel a deeper nostalgia—one for the place I come from. We grew up in a block of flats located right by the Bay of Gdańsk, so we would walk barefoot to the beach, run across the street and a small park, and dive straight into the sea. The block was built in the 1970s, a time of rapid industrial and housing development. Up to 300,000 apartments were being built annually. Along with Gdańsk’s expansion, massive industrial plants emerged. My neighborhood was once a fishing village, and remnants of that past can still be seen along the shoreline—small houses lined along a cobblestone
path. But they are disappearing fast, replaced by Airbnb rental apartments.

During my childhood, large areas between the blocks would be flooded in winter to create ice rinks. In spring and summer, kids, basketball players, footballers, and rollerbladers would take over the space. From morning till evening, someone was always playing something, sitting on a low wall, or drawing with chalk on the concrete. Now, those vast open areas have become parking lots. Wild parking lots. There used to be poles to prevent cars from accidentally running over playing children, but people stopped pretending to care.

The kids disappeared. You no longer hear the echo of a bouncing basketball—not that there’s anything to aim at since the hoops, installed by my friend’s father, were simply cut down. The court lines faded long ago. The sandpits were removed to make more room for cars. Now, adults put up signs saying, „No ball games allowed,” just to make sure no one accidentally breaks a window on their oversized SUVs. The ice rinks, of course, will never return—not because of the parked cars but because there are no longer weeks of persistent frost. Scorching temperatures and a lack of rain in summer, along with rising pollution, make it impossible to dream of swimming in the sea. Cyanobacteria blooms in the Baltic are becoming more frequent and lasting longer.

Will Gdańsk and other port cities disappear underwater? Many climate models and forecasts suggest they will. When I return to Gdańsk to visit my parents, I feel an emptiness in my heart because the world I knew has simply vanished. Giant factories dump chemicals into the rivers, which ultimately flow into the Baltic. And instead of helping children face the climate catastrophe, adults hide away in their air-conditioned cars.