WIP: Edyta Majewska, The Other White

Edyta Majewska came with her daughter to live in Scotland in 2006. Ten years later while she was working as a cleaner in a school in Glasgow, the sports hall was set up with polling booths for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. As a Polish national, Majewska had become worried for her own future. Although highly educated, language barriers and economic necessity sometimes led her to take on jobs where she felt socially invisible. Now the voices of bigoted politicians were making her feel she could very shortly be made to disappear altogether. Majewska turned her anger and frustration in a positive direction. On the day before the referendum she filmed herself sweeping up around the polling booths. Later she coupled this footage with Nigel Farage’s grating voice to make a short but powerful video, The Other White. Farage was gloating over the Brexiteers’ historic victory that came, he claimed, because of the EU’s open door policy on immigration. Seventeen million people voted for Brexit because immigrants had created too much pressure on wages, GP appointments and kids places in schools. Really?

The short film was the beginning of an investigation into the experience of being someone who ticks the ‘other white’ box in the equalities section of job application forms. The toxic xenophobic atmosphere surrounding the Brexit campaign led Majewska to apply for British citizenship. In October 2018 after a long and very expensive process she finally swore her oath and received her certificate as she posed beneath a picture of the Queen in Glasgow City Chambers. The whole process of becoming a British citizen cost in the region of two thousand pounds, but with it came a relative sense of security. Unless the current rules change, Majewska’s daughter Nikoletta will need to work and pay taxes for another four years before she too has the opportunity to go through the same process.

Majewska has created a multi-layered body of work in response to Brexit that is based on her direct experience as a working class woman and immigrant in Scotland. She is striving towards an installation that creates a living space where her stories are told through the fabric of the surroundings themselves. She has used significant snapshots of her family and friends as the basis for creating abstract wallpapers upon which regular documentary photographs and Polaroids will be hung. The wallpapers have the mesmeric quality of Persian rugs but on close looking they reveal details of repeated figurative patterns: Nikoletta in uniform on her first day at high school, one Lithuanian cleaner teaching another to speak English, family members braving cold sea waters on their first visit to Scotland, the top floor high rise flat offered to Majewska as home when she first arrived here. If you do not look closely you will not see those hidden personal stories. You will only see the images hung on top of the wallpaper.

The documentary images have the feel of a disjointed, almost invented, family album. The photographs are those of a displaced person fashioning a history out of the connections they make and find in their new land. There are pictures of Polish veterans of World War II attending Remembrance Day in George’s Square. Men who fought with the British against the Nazis but who could not return home afterwards for fear of Stalinist repression. There are photographs of birthdays and other parties, neighbours and friends. Everything is in colour and shot digitally because Majewska is literally allergic to analogue darkrooms. The exceptions to that rule are her faded Polaroids on which she invites people to write their thoughts about Brexit. 

Through her work Majewska would like to give a voice to people who are made to feel vulnerable in the heightened anti-immigrant climate of Brexit. This work is a reminder of the pain of being invisible and of having an uncertain future. It is also a reminder that, in spite of neo-liberal rhetoric, Britain remains a society deeply divided along class lines. If, when, Brexit happens, the economic disruption caused will hit the poor harder than anyone else in society and the blame will be heaped just as predictably at the door of immigrants and people on benefits. Majewska's work is an important and timely response to an extreme political crisis that the UK's mainstream politicians have proven utterly incapable of dealing with.

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All images © Edyta Majewska