Students of Gdańsk’s Academy of Fine Arts have created illustrations for the Emigrant’s Archive project.

When we think of archives, what comes to mind?Dust, cobwebs, and cramped storage?Then you haven’t seen the Emigrants Archive–a unique project documenting the emigration experiences of Poles from all over the world; full of life and passion, vivid tales of people of all walks of life, who speak with pride of their travels to every latitude and longitude.Not only do these protagonists and authors form a part of the history of Polish emigration with the tales they write; we should consider them our historians abroad.

The Emigrant’s Archive is a project directed at all age groups and all professions.It is our belief that even people of limited life experience have their own unique morsel to contribute to complete and enrich the whole. And so we have decided to invite young artists from the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts.Under the direction of established academic lecturers from the Editorial Design Studio – professor Janusz Górski and Dr. Anita Wasik, they managed to create a dozen or so extraordinary posters that translate the idea of our project into the language of image and of visual arts.

The students’ fresh and original proposals proved to form a fantastic illustration of the Emigrant’s Archive – an unusually broad and multi-threaded project. They approach the subject of emigration with many new ideas and from many different angles.Still, these images (?) are easily engraved in one’s memory and cater to a necessity for reaching the widest audience possible.

Anna Holik’s poster is particularly interesting. It impressed us with its original form, dynamism, and its offbeat paraphrasing of the project’s slogan – Stories Worthy of East and West [an Polish idiom meaning „Worthy stories”-trans].The artist’s creation will be used in the promotion of the Emigrant’s Archive. We present it to you together with other posters which we believe are all well worth your attention.