LOVE LETTERs
Video performance 9:47’
2021 - 2023
Script, direction: Agata Stępień
Collaboration: Eugenio Hernández Moreno
Co-creators: Marian Przybylski, Giovanni Bazzo, Katarzyna Kot
The project Love Letters is an audiovisual reflection on the mechanisms of affective memory, transgenerational heritage, and the material traces of love within the context of private stories immersed in historical trauma. Developed progressively between 2021 and 2023 in Barcelona, Andalusia, and the Błędów Desert in Poland — a unique natural phenomenon that provides an exceptional backdrop for contemplating memory, history, and identity — this video art piece is the result of a creative collaboration between Agata Stępień and audiovisual artist Eugenio Hernández Moreno. The geographical and cultural diversity of these production sites highlights the project’s multidimensional nature, enriching the audiovisual narrative and deepening its interdisciplinary scope.
This work is part of a broader cycle of artistic activities carried out by the author in dialogue with international art institutions and represents the second collaboration with Hernández Moreno for the Museum of Photography in Huete, in cooperation with the Antonio Pérez Foundation Castilla-La Mancha.
The starting point of the project was the artist's accidental discovery of a drawer containing love letters written by her father to her mother — a deeply intimate collection, ultimately marked by the story of a separation. The letters, as a visually compelling, plastic, and highly symbolic medium, function in Stępień’s work as carriers of an emotional and archival code — remnants of past relationships, absent voices, and testimonies of silenced experiences.
In its conceptual dimension, Love Letters refers to the legacy of the women in the artist’s family: not only her mother but also her great-grandmothers, whose correspondence survived wars, migrations, and dramatic separations. The piece thus explores questions related to emotional transmission, the tension between individual memory and collective history, and the role of women as guardians of memory — those who preserve, conceal, and sometimes restore the voices of the past.
The video art premiered in 2023 during the Night of Museums at the DIM Gallery in Warsaw and is currently exhibited at the Museum of Krakow as part of the exhibition Siłaczki. The central idea of the project is to reflect on the inheritance of trauma, particularly that linked to wartime experiences, placing the female figure at the heart of the narrative — her role as a memory keeper and the strength with which she processes, preserves, and transmits the emotional weight of such experiences.
2024 pokaz Galeria DIM podczas Nocy Muzeów w Warszawie
2024 Muzeum krakowa Siłaczki
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muzeum krakowa
2025 Muzeum Fotografii Huete Exposiciones Temporales en curso | Fundación Antonio Pérez
2024 – Exhibition at DIM Gallery during the Night of Museums in Warsaw
2024 – "Siłaczki" exhibition at the Museum of Krakow
2025 – Temporary exhibition at the Museum of Photography in Huete, Fundación Antonio Pérez
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© Agata Stępień 2025