Mateusz Sejfryd
Keywords: Road-movie, Metaphysics, Preservation
Internship: Observatorium - Rotterdam
Drives: The Anatomies of the A2 explores the geopoetics of migration on the A2/E30 EU highway, where the story of the road and belonging is told from the perspective of a passenger. The narration challenges the notion of a cultureless place, by using fragmentation and preservation as methods of storytelling. By framing the loss of control as an opportunity for listening, it invites the visitor to confront the feelings of nostalgia, offering an alternative way to engage through departing.
It is 2012. Poland is eagerly preparing to host UEFA Euro 2012, while my mother and sister pack the family’s old Peugeot 307 for our move to the Netherlands. Ahead of us lies a twelve-hour drive across two borders and through increasingly unfamiliar landscapes, accompanied by the endless hum of the engine and a noisy radio that, to our luck, still eats our childhood cassettes.
When my mother was deciding whether to buy this car, I remember how she noticed that the seats were pleasantly soft. Now, spending that much time sunk in the backseat just hurts my back. Indeed, the nature of being on a journey radically redefines one’s perception of comfort and control. To occupy the passenger seat gives you only enough freedom to anticipate and reflect on what’s mundane: from the travel necessities like the luggage crammed into the trunk, to the conflicting feelings of what’s taken or left behind. Yet, it is precisely the space of delay that positions us for the arrival.
Inside the enclosed environment of the car, the core elements of the road, such as navigating the shifting languages, being pulled away from home, and repetitive encounters become psychological extensions of a migrant’s sense of belonging. This intersection creates a unique state of an ‘arrival-less-drive’: a condition in which longing for home transforms into the feeling of never truly being able to arrive. In this sense, my own journey becomes not a memory to revisit, but an ongoing archive of dislocation, fragmentation, and transition, that lives beyond the drive.
Many stories of migration begin with a recollection of the first journey: from the initial moments of courage, to dreams of what new place had to offer. Over time, these stories evolve, and grow, often becoming foundational narratives of resilience and reinvention. Surrounded by physical fragments of the highway, this exhibition utilises preservation and fragmentation as strategies for communicating a narrative. The interviews recorded on the cassettes explore the interior of a car as an opportunity for engaged conversation, while the preservation jars question the migrant’s capacity to differentiate between enshrining and preserving a fragmented identity.
The rhythm of all these patterns is diFficult not to surrender to, yet it also opens a space to step away from one’s sense of self. Drives confronts the disengagement inherent in the migrant experience, claiming the discomfort of the road as the only authentic territory the outsider can truly own.