Not Our Darkness

The history of the Gdansk Shipyard as a setting to explore Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’.

30 years from the formation of Solidarity, 20 years from the introduction of democracy in Poland, there is widespread concern that the Gdansk Shipyard will be irrevocably destroyed through urban re-development. Using fragments of archive film from the popular struggle in the Poland, together with footage of the current destruction of the Gdansk Shipyard, Not Our Darkness is a poetic exploration of how memory, time and place interweave to form ‘image-constellations’; and how urban re-development threatens to obliterate the traces of past struggles.