If loss were a currency: on Kamila Kuc’s I Was There

by Kamila Kuc, Laima Leyton, Dara Waldron, Ecka Mordecai, Jeremy Fernando

One sometimes wonders if silence speaks loudest not only because it signals to an absence, or an inability to articulate despite wanting to, but that it reminds us that even in whatever is said, uttered, yelled, there is always also a silence accompanying it, walking beside it, within it. And it be tales which hold on to these silences who speak loudest to us.

I Was There is one such tale. A story by Helena Kuc as inherited by—and simultaneously born(e) through—her granddaughter, Kamila Kuc, it is both from before and after her. So, two tales telling themselves in their own times and contemporaneously, with each other. Fully cognisant that what is lost in the telling, in all tellings, what remains silent, is the now—that remains for the ones who watch, the ones who listen, the ones who see.

That it be the ones attending to these tales—Laima Leyton, Ecka Mordecai, Dara Waldon, Jeremy Fernando, Kamila Kuc herself, and you—who hold on to this loss. A loss that is a currency: not just because it is traded, shared, but always also electric, charged. Where all of us run the risk of being charged and held accountable for—and potentially recharged and electrified by—opening ourselves to that loss.

About the Artist

Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born, London- and Seattle-based filmmaker whose work has shown internationally in places such as National Gallery (DC), Goethe Institute (Georgia), the Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA and BFI London, Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and many others. Kuc’s first feature, What We Shared (UK/USA/Abkhazia, 2021; funded by the Arts Council England) dealt with trauma of the 1992-93 war between Abkhazia and Georgia and led her to seek training in Social Justice and Multicultural Counseling at Seattle University. She’s been drawing upon her knowledge as a counselor in her artistic work. Her Plot of Blue Sky (UK/Morocco, 2023; funded by the Arts Council England) won the 2024 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Practice Research award in Short Film category for her ‘collaborative practices and ethical approach to working in different cultural contexts.’ Her Plot of Blue Sky has also recently been awarded the 2024 Jean Rouch Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival (Tampa, Florida) in recognition of ‘the exemplary use of ethnofiction techniques produced in a collaborative manner that embody the spirit of Rouch’s “anthropologie partagée” (shared anthropology).’ Kuc’s oeuvre has been extensively written about by the leading documentary film scholar, Dara Waldron in the 10th edition of Found Footage Magazine (October 2024). Kuc owns Dark Spring Studio – an international production company dedicated to the production and distribution of artist moving image works that focus on stories that are personal and that are committed to social change.