On 27 April this year, Michal Iwanowski left his house in Cardiff to walk to his home village of Mokrzeszów in Poland. Carrying British and Polish passports and wearing a T-shirt bearing the word “Polska”, he began his 1,200-mile journey east, sticking as closely as possible to a straight line he had drawn on a map. Over 105 days, it would take him through Wales, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic.
Along the way, Iwanowski posted a diary of his journey on Instagram, recording his thoughts, encounters and impressions of the landscape, the images and words unfolding as a meditation on belonging and transience. “I saw the project as a way of thinking about the idea of home,” he says, “not least because it would take me from the place I have lived in for 18 years to the place I come from. And I would be doing it at a time when Brexit had made the idea of home, identity and belonging a very politicised subject.”
Iwanowski had been thinking about walking to Poland for several years, after being confronted in 2008 by graffiti scrawled on a wall in the Roath area of Cardiff, where he lives. “Go Home, Polish,” it read. He has since appropriated the line for the project’s title. “I wasn’t shocked, but it stayed with me,” he says. “I started thinking, ‘Should I be really going home or am I already home?’ As Brexit became more volatile, I found myself thinking more about what you might call the human dilemma of home: how we can, if we have to, make a home anywhere and nowhere.”
The photographer is no stranger to long, arduous journeys on foot. In August 2013, he set out from Kaluga to retrace the steps of his grandfather Tolek, who escaped from a Russian gulag with his brother Wiktor in 1945. Travelling under cover of darkness, they made it home to Poland in three months. For his project, Clear of People, Iwanowski traced the same 1,360-mile route following a map Wiktor had drawn. In freezing temperatures, he walked eight hours a day, staying in motels to thaw out and take notes. It was an often isolated journey through timeless terrain. “In the forest,” he says, “it’s possible everything looks the same now as it did 70 years ago.”
