The jury selected twenty projects with the greatest publishing potential. From this group, BLOW UP PRESS publishers have chosen two that will be published in the form of books. They are Erna - Helena - Ania by Tomasz Laczny and object amnesic: a compost manifesto by the artistic duo Henrik Strömberg & Jens Soneryd.

Tomasz Laczny’s Erna - Helena - Ania deals with the notion of loss and absence. Unfolding the dream-like stream of memories the project deals with ghosts and traces which reality leaves behind. It is an intimate research of the relationship between love, war, and death but also of the isolation of people in the face of historical events.

“My grandmother was German living on the border between Poland and Germany before WWII,” - one can read in the project description. - “She fell in love with a Polish guy. It was towards the end of WWII. It was forbidden. Both of them could be killed if that would be discovered or at least they would be publicly humiliated and punished. Moreover, she got pregnant and was hiding her pregnancy for many months.

After the war, like many other civilians, she was imprisoned in the camp for Germans. She gave birth to my mother but, because of her poor conditions, was not able to raise her and had to give her away. The European borders have been moved after WWII by the decision of a few key political figures and all Germans have been ordered to be expelled (the largest forced migration in history). My grandmother hoping to be reunited with her daughter decided to stay and gained Polish nationality. But still for her (as ex-German) life in Poland was extremely difficult. She lived in the shadow of guilt and memories of what happened in Poland during WWII. All her family has been expelled. And it took many years for her to be with her daughter together again.”

"Although based on the author’s family experience, this project has a very universal connotation," says Grzegorz Kosmala of BLOW UP PRESS. - "The story is told through a variety of means. We find here photographs, also archival, graphics and comics. Despite such diverse means, the whole is very coherent and is an excellent starting point for creating a visually inspiring story, which is like a mirror of our time."

AWARDS

• WINNER - Polish Graphic Design Awards 2022 - Publications 2021/Album 
• BRONZE WINNER - International Photography Awards 2021 - Book/Fine Art 
• SILVER WINNER - Tokyo International Foto Awards 2021 - Book/Fine Art

In turn, the project of Henrik Strömberg and Jens Soneryd object amnesic: a compost manifesto is an attempt to use the notion of the compost as a tool to explore photography as a medium, with the aim to disclose hitherto overlooked or rejected potential usages.

Both artists started to cooperate on this project in 2016. The book will be thus a natural development of further studies on the compost and development of the thoughts outlined in the manifesto. “The project deals with topics such as growth and decay, memory and forgetting, permanence and change, the desiring gaze and the detached gaze. It also reflects on technologies for understanding, such as writing and photography. These are powerful technologies developed as aides for making visible, mapping, preserving, fixing, organising and governing. In short, they are powerful tools for keeping, controlling and preserving. ‘object amnesic: a compost manifesto' explores if and how these technologies also can be applied in opposition to their intended usages, if they can also be deployed to un-learn what we have learned from them? 

‘object amnesic: a compost manifesto' questions the predominant technocratic Cartesian view on nature as something–separate from society or culture – to be measured, predicted and controlled. It challenges the very notion that control is a desirable achievement. Instead of trying to control and to govern artistic or natural processes, the book encourages us to join these very processes, to become part of them, or simply to acknowledge that we already are part of them despite that we most often pretend not to be,” - one can read in the project description. 

"Of all the finalists, the Strömberg and Soneryd project caught our attention in terms of substance and visual value," - says Aneta Kowalczyk of BLOW UP PRESS. - "Thoughtful, undermining the current status quo and trying to give it a new-old meaning. This is an uncompromising and courageous approach. For us it is also important that we find here original and pure form of photography that makes us realise how beautiful the medium it is."

AWARDS

• Shortlisted for the the 2022 Rencontres d'Arles Book Awards in the Photo-Text Book category
• Shortlisted for the 2022 Fedrigoni Top Awards in the Publishing category

• Corine Aalvanger (the Netherlands) - Don’t Mention the War
• Parisa Aminolahi (the Netherlands) - Tehran Diary
• Sara Bennett (USA) - Inside & Out: Portraits of Women with Life Sentences
• Betty Bogaert (Canada) - The Howling Mountain
• Carlos Chavarría (USA) - Façade
• Anna Galí (Spain) - Time on Quaaludes and Red Wine
• Jakob Ganslmeier (the Netherlands) - Haut, Stein: Inscription in Human Bodies and Architecture
• Thomas Gauthier (France) - Entre-deux
• Michael Honegger (France) - The Need to Know
• Tomasz Laczny (United Kingdom) - Erna Helena Ania
• Duy Phuong Le Nguyen (Vietnam) - Mirages
• Marco Marzocchi (Italy) - Fragile
• Annalisa Natali Murri (Italy) - A Respectable Family: The Murri Affair
• Maksym Rudnik (Poland) - Neon Bible
• Ioanna Sakellaraki (Belgium) - The Truth Is in the Soil
• Miriam Stanke (Germany) - And the Mountain Said to Munzur: You, River of My Tears
• Henrik Strömberg, Jens Soneryd (Germany) - The Compost. A Manifesto
• Junya Suzuki (Japan) - An Aesthetic of Everyday Life
• Michael Swann (United Kingdom) - Noema
• Farshid Tighehsaz (Iran) - From Labyrinth: Living with Anonymous Apprehensions