A Word for a World (or A World After the World)
Dominik Wojciechowski, Svijet, and the things a book can hold
Last summer, I traveled less and read more. So my special encounters were arising mainly out of pages.
Still, there was one real journey at the beginning of the summer holidays, one that continued to unfold in my mind for weeks afterwards: the opening week of this year’s Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles. And so I met Dominik Wojciechowski again after many years.
Dominik, from Poland, and I, from Czechia, met as photography students at the Silesian University in Opava, on the Czech side of the Polish-Czech borderland. Life took us in different directions, as it does. We kept in touch from time to time, and years later, there we were again, in Arles, France. We hugged each other and I was genuinely moved.
And then there was his book.
I knew about it. I knew how long he had been carrying this project with him, working on it, returning to it. Dominik spent years working as a translator in the countries of former Yugoslavia, living much closer to this complicated territory and its people than someone who simply travels there to make photographs.
And now the book was finally finished.
I brought my copy of Svijet home from Arles, and only then, during the slower days of summer, I really started to spend time with it.
Svijet. A solid, restrained object bound in deep burgundy cloth, with a small black-and-white photograph attached to its cover almost like an old postage stamp. The edges of the pages continue the color of the binding into the body of the object. Different papers interrupt one another. Some pages obscure; others reveal. Images appear through material before they become fully legible.
The book asks you to slow down and dive into its world after the world.
Dominik made the binding himself.
There are 380 copies.
And inside them is a country that no longer exists on a map but has not entirely disappeared from people.
A word for a world
The title Svijet means “world,” but it also carries a more specific reference. Dominik took it from Svijet, a Yugoslav lifestyle magazine that presented the colorful life of the country and ceased publication in 1991, on the eve of the wars that followed Yugoslavia’s dissolution. For him, its disappearance marked the symbolic end of an era.
The introductory text by Maja Pupovac expands the word further. A svijet encompasses a human society, social relations, particular ways of life, the network of things through which a world becomes recognizable to those living inside it.
This distinction becomes essential to Dominik’s work. He is not only interested in the former Yugoslavia as a disappeared state, but in the world of experience that continued to exist in people even after the state disappeared.
A state can formally cease to exist. Its borders can be redrawn. Streets can be renamed. New political identities can be established. None of these processes guarantees that the interior world carried by people changes at the same speed.
Dominik became interested precisely in this unevenness.
He came to the subject through an unusual route. After not being admitted to the University of Art in Poznań, he turned to Croatian Studies and, through a series of student exchanges, spent around two years in Croatia. Photography continued alongside languages, research and life in the region. His projects, although visually different, repeatedly returned to what he describes as questions somewhere between identity and space.
This gave him an ambiguous position. He was not from former Yugoslavia. But neither was he simply passing through it.
He learned its languages. He worked and lived within the region. He developed relationships there over time. And still, importantly, he maintained the distance of someone who had not himself lived through Yugoslavia or the wars following its dissolution.
Dominik described this position to me very simply: he was neither the photographer newly arrived in a place and photographing “everything that moves,” nor the local person for whom the subject might be impossible to separate from direct experience.
Z.M: How did knowing the languages change what you were able to see - and what people allowed you to see?
D.W: Knowing Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian gave me a completely different reception from the first second. People instantly found a connection with me and were fascinated that a young man from Poland was interested in their side of the story. So I would say knowing those languages was crucial.
I find this position important because Svijet is not constructed from spectacular historical images.
It operates through details.
A bust pushed into a corner. Interiors. Faces. Objects. Images from television. Ordinary traces through which political history has entered daily life and stayed there.
One sequence has remained with me particularly strongly.
A man stands on a ladder in Zagreb. In one photograph he is removing a blue street sign: Trg maršala Tita (Marshal Tito Square). In the next, another sign appears: Trg Republike Hrvatske (Republic of Croatia Square). The renaming was part of a formal political process in Zagreb; the city's mayor publicly proposed the change in 2017.
But Dominik’s photographs do something different from documenting the political debate. There is no crowd. No ceremony. No grand historical gesture.
There is a worker. A ladder. A wall. A street sign.
It looks almost like maintenance. Yet in Dominik’s frame, it begins to resemble a performance.
Between the two images, a symbolic geography is being rewritten.
This may be one of photography's strange capacities: history enters the frame without necessarily looking historical.
The histories we inherit without being told
Perhaps this is also where Svijet began to reach me personally.
I grew up somewhere else, within another history: in Červená Voda, a village near the Polish border in northeastern Bohemia, in the former Sudetenland.
I belong to a generation born in the 1980s. Some of my earliest political memories are not really political, they are simply childhood images: Soviet soldiers in the barracks in nearby Moravský Karlov, military convoys blocking the road to school, and my anxiety that I would arrive late.
I did not experience political repression directly, at least not in the way earlier generations did, but the rituals and atmosphere of the communist period were still present around us. There was a kind of Soviet veil hanging over the landscape. Even later, when I started riding horses, the stables and pastures were often former military grounds and exercise areas. Although they had been cleared, traces remained: pieces of metal, discarded fragments, military leftovers slowly disappearing beneath the grass as I wandered around. The political past was still physically there, even when I did not yet have the language to understand it.
The history before that was much less visible.
Growing up, I kept asking where our family came from and what had existed in the houses and landscape before us. Nobody seemed able, or perhaps willing, to give me a clear answer. In the attic I found old kitchen containers carrying German inscriptions and other objects whose language belonged to somebody else's version of the place. As a child, I initially interpreted the silence simply as adults not considering my questions important. Later I began to understand that there were things people preferred not to approach.
When history refuses to become a coherent story, objects become evidence.
Perhaps that is one reason I respond so strongly to the fragments in Svijet.
The histories of the Sudetenland and Yugoslavia should not be collapsed into one another. Their political circumstances, ruptures and consequences are different. What connects them for me is something more intimate: the experience of living inside a geography whose previous world has disappeared while traces of it remain everywhere.
My childhood Polish border was another version of this.
I would often join my father to cross into Poland to buy cheaper petrol and, as I remember it, better clothes.
For a child, crossing the border felt thrillingly international, despite the other side being geographically so close. Later, riding horses through the hills, I would occasionally cross the line secretly and experience the absurd excitement of being a small rebel, suddenly “abroad” because an invisible line had been crossed.
Only much later does one understand how much meaning societies ask borders to carry.
I do not want to make myself the subject of an article about Dominik. But somehow the person looking can't be removed entirely from what they see.
Perhaps we find certain works because something in us recognizes something in them.
Neither nostalgia nor its opposite
Dominik is careful about the word Yugonostalgia.
One of the people appearing in the project, Nadj Olajoš Mikloš, puts the problem succinctly: he dislikes the term, particularly its second half, because nostalgia implies that what is longed for can never exist again.
Svijet does not simply propose that Yugoslavia was better, nor does it offer nostalgia as a political solution. Its territory is more ambiguous: how people continue negotiating identities formed before, during and after a historical rupture.
Dominik told me that when developing the book with Jakub at Rust Publishing, he wanted an object that would be calm and reflective, something that allowed a viewer to enter slowly into the state of “in-betweenness” he associated with the people he had encountered.
Z.M: What does that “in-betweenness” mean to you now? Has your understanding of Yugonostalgia changed during the years between making the photographs and finally publishing them?
D.W: I shifted towards a search for post-Yugoslav identity after trying to understand whether I could somehow distinguish a specifically Croatian identity while I was living there. I realized it was impossible to capture. Then I remembered a class in which I had first heard the term “Yugonostalgia,” and it caught my attention. In Poland, we also had communism, but nobody wants it back, so I wanted to understand why some people in the Balkans seemed to. It didn’t seem logical to me. But after a few years of talking to local people, I began to understand how they saw the difference, and I could slowly grasp their point of view.
There is also another important thing that has to be mentioned. Whenever I talk about this story, one of the first questions I get is whether this is nostalgia for communism and its values, or simply nostalgia for childhood. It is one of those questions that cannot really be answered. I think it has to remain like that.
Dominik says he understood quite early that this would be difficult to photograph because the context was so wide. This was also why he asked Maja Pupovac to write a text for the book: he wanted people outside the region to be able to enter the subject without reducing it to visible remnants of Yugoslavia.
What interested him photographically was something less obvious: situations and small details that could easily be missed, but through which post-Yugoslav identity reveals itself. He gives me the example of a train passing through Bosnia and Herzegovina and changing locomotives as it crosses into Republika Srpska, an apparently practical detail carrying a much larger political geography inside it.
There is humor here too, although of a particularly regional kind.
Dominik points to a packet of cigarettes carrying the same warning three times, in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. The languages are institutionally separated and yet the sentence sounds essentially the same. For him, details such as this expose something slightly absurd within the construction of post-Yugoslav identities.
The project works best when it does not announce what such details mean.
It lets them sit there.
Look again.
Notice the difference.
Notice the similarity.
The book is not a container
There is another reason Svijet interests me.
Books are not simply carriers of information, but objects whose physical construction changes the way information is received.
Here I also have to mention Daria Izworska, who edited and translated Svijet. Her work had crossed my path before: years ago, I included her book God’s Children in the theoretical part of my master’s degree, focused on Photography with Unseen Faces. Finding her here again, inside Svijet, feels like another of those connections that return through books, images and friendships.
At one stage of my own work, I became closely involved with publishing, working with my own small team of graphic designers, editors and translators. I thought about every book as an object that should speak for itself through its typography, choice of paper, printing, and the way text and illustrations were selected and placed. I wanted each book to retain the feeling of being its own project, something to curate, shape and complete as a whole. Eventually, this curiosity led me further into bookbinding, including a course with Paz Alomar at Taller Verd in Mallorca.
So when I look at Svijet, I cannot quite separate the images from the decisions that hold them.
Perhaps this is also why I cannot look at Dominik’s binding only formally. I know something of the quiet concentration of a workshop, and also how much has to hold together around us for that kind of concentration to become possible.
Five different kinds of paper are used throughout the book. A recurring sequence of television screenshots represents the minute of silence following Tito's death. Dominik describes their repetition as a gesture of respect towards both Yugonostalgic people and the memory of Yugoslavia.
Another image, the television presenter who announced Tito's death, is printed on a translucent material. Dominik's explanation is almost painfully simple: memory is what remains, and it slowly disappears. When the page is held against the light, so does the image.
Here, material is no longer packaging.
Material is meaning.
Z.M: Do you experience bookbinding as an extension of photography, or as another practice that you want to keep developing alongside it?
D.W: I see photography and bookbinding as two passions I don’t want to let go of. I want to continue doing both. With photography, though, I only make stories about things that matter to me.
This is perhaps also why I resist describing Svijet simply as a photobook.
The sequence is photographic, certainly. But it also operates as archive, testimony, visual research and constructed object. Different kinds of evidence encounter each other inside it without being forced into the same register.
Photographs sometimes prove almost nothing.
Objects sometimes prove almost nothing.
Memory notoriously proves almost nothing.
Placed together, however, they can construct something more complicated than proof: a space in which another person's world becomes temporarily imaginable.
Binding
Then something unexpected happened.
Bookbinding, which had been essential to the final form of Svijet, began developing into another practice altogether.
Dominik moved a little outside Poznań and turned one of the rooms of his new home into a workshop. On 7 January 2025, he attended his first bookbinding lesson with Andriy Malachowski and has continued learning with him since.
Z.M: What does your workshop look like now? What can your hands do today that they could not do one year ago, and what do you still want them to learn?
D.W: I’ve managed to set up the workshop with the furniture and most of the tools I need to work smoothly. There are still a few more tools I need before I can work completely independently, so selling my book will help a lot with that. I also want to save for further courses, but for now I simply want to keep repeating what I’ve learned, until the practice becomes natural and I remember it physically.
He describes the route towards bookbinding as gradual. He had been searching for a form of skilled manual work, something beautiful to make, something repetitive enough to become meditative, something dependent upon precision.
Then he found books.
And practised. And practised more.
This does not feel like abandoning photography. Perhaps it is almost the opposite.
Photography has always had a complicated relationship with touch. The camera inevitably places a certain distance between the photographer and the thing photographed. Bookbinding returns the body to the process. Measuring, cutting, sewing, pressing, gluing, covering, polishing, the image eventually meets a hand again.
A national border separates.
A photographic frame separates.
A page separates one image from another.
Binding does something opposite.
It joins.
I do not want to push this metaphor too far, but once it appeared to me, I could not quite stop seeing it. I love that. The experience of touching, holding and feeling through our physical bodies, through our hands, travels back into the mind, where everything appears, changes and dissolves, gets connected.
Forty-two hours
Recently Dominik sent me photographs of another binding he was making.
This time it was not his photography.
It was Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“Been doing it for 42 hours,” he wrote.
I looked at the photographs: leather shifting from deep green through ochre towards red; raised circular forms across its surface; exposed elements of the binding structure punctuating the spine; decorated edges turning the closed book into another surface altogether.
“Wow. One of my favorite books from my youth.”
There are certain people we meet only intermittently, yet something persists. Years pass. Then one conversation suddenly reveals another shared attraction, another obsession, another path one of you has travelled that the other once considered taking.
Perhaps friendship sometimes works this way too: someone reflects an abandoned or less visible part of yourself back towards you.
Z.M: Why One Hundred Years of Solitude? What actually happens during those forty-two hours, and how do you begin designing a physical object around a book already carrying such a large imaginative world?
D.W: 100 años de Soledad has an incredible amount of details you need to learn in order to make such a cover. I still have to go through that process a few times to get my head around it. There is something fitting about this particular title appearing here, although I am reluctant to make too much symbolism from coincidence.
A book concerned with memory and generations becomes an object constructed through hours of handwork.
Another world receives another body.
Those forty-two hours stayed with me for another reason.
I have been thinking for years that art and security are inseparable. Not because art should serve security, and certainly not because creative life should become militarized, but because sustained creative attention depends on certain conditions around it.
A workshop can become quiet because something outside it is holding.
A country has its structures for protecting the space in which people can live, develop, enjoy, disagree and create. A family has its own smaller architecture of care and responsibility. When these are shared, another kind of time becomes possible: time to experiment, to fail, to concentrate, perhaps to spend forty-two hours binding one book simply because this is how long the work requires.
My own life has often made me understand this through its absence. There were years when much of my attention went into caring for my children, while those who were supposed to share the work of protecting and holding our lives together were not really present; into inevitable work, responsibility, and simply keeping life functioning. At the same time, my professional attention increasingly moved towards defense and questions of how societies protect freedoms we so easily take for granted.
Perhaps this is another reason why Dominik’s workshop touches something in me. The possibility of entering such a room, closing the door and giving oneself completely to making is already a particular form of freedom. And perhaps the same is true of writing this text now. I am deeply grateful that I can.
What survives
Svijet was finally published by Rust Publishing in 2026, after years of photographic work followed by years in which the project itself seems to have needed time to settle. Dominik describes the distance as important: the emotional intensity had to disperse before the final design could become quiet.
The book premiered at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, an achievement he mentions alongside being selected for the ShowOFF section of Krakow Photomonth in 2020 as particularly meaningful moments in his trajectory.
But another form of recognition may be even more revealing.
Dominik noticed that almost all copies bought internationally were being purchased by people belonging to the Balkan diaspora.
For an artist looking at another region from an inevitably external starting position, that matters.
Z.M: What did it mean to realize that people from the region, and particularly people living away from it, were finding something of themselves in the book?
D.W: I think the diaspora buying my book can mean a few things. It may be people who escaped the war and started a new life elsewhere, but still carry that Balkan part of themselves and can experience a kind of time travel through the book. Or it may simply be people interested in seeing their own playground from another perspective.
While writing this in Prague, I keep seeing another line forming on the map. Dominik’s years in Croatia and Kosovo; his life now in Poznań; my desk here in Prague; and this text eventually travelling north to Ashik Zaman and C-print in Stockholm.
It makes a beautiful south-to-north thread through Europe—not necessarily one of its most loudly narrated cultural axes, yet one along which histories, languages, memories and people have been moving for generations. Perhaps this article itself is becoming another small movement along that line.
Perhaps that response brings the project back to its title.
A svijet is not simply a place.
A world can persist after its geography changes.
It can survive in language. In gestures. In the way somebody remembers a television announcement. In an old photograph. A bust in the corner of a room. A street sign removed from a wall. A joke whose absurdity depends upon understanding three languages at once.
Or in a book.
And books are peculiar memory machines. We ask paper, thread, glue, cloth and images to carry things considerably heavier than themselves.
When I met Dominik again in Arles, I thought initially that I was encountering an old friend and his finished project.
I understand the encounter somewhat differently now.
The project was not really finished.
One object had simply opened onto another practice.
Do you still primarily understand yourself as a photographer? Or are photography, language, research, bookmaking and binding becoming parts of one practice for you now?
I am curious about his answer. But I think I will keep that question open until we meet—to eye, heart to heart.
Perhaps because, somewhere between photography and books, between Poland and Croatia, between the world that disappeared and the objects still carrying it, Dominik’s practice seems increasingly concerned with something very simple and very difficult:
how to give form to what remains.
Dominik Wojciechowski, Svijet, Rust Publishing, 2026
Zuzana Malina is a Czech independent curator, cultural professional and visual researcher based in Prague. Working across photography, publishing, and questions of art, collective memory and societal resilience, her practice has included several publishing projects, editorial work for literary festival Book World Prague, or curating Diplomatic Clubs in Prague, supporting a critical view on security, diplomacy and European cultural-political intersections. She graduated from the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University in Opava.