The photographs feature a white-clad sailor posing alone or in the company of smiling women and men against the backdrop of exotic architecture, elegant hotel interiors, vintage automobiles or by a ship’s bulwark. Handwritten notes on the reverse of the photographs indicate that they were taken in Curaçao between 1932 and 1937. How did they make their way to Jarosław – a small town in Podkarpacie, where Branas found them? All attempts to identify the seaman have failed. Nevertheless, the artist resolved to re-create his identity as faithfully as possible with the help of the scarce traces available and the associations that the images brought to his mind.
The cheerful photographs of the Dutch sailor with the 1930s Willemstad architecture in the background seem ominous against the backdrop of the centuries of colonization and destruction of the island. At the same time, the fact that the artist came across these images in a small provincial town in Eastern Poland symbolically indicates global processes of which we are not only witnesses, but also beneficiaries. In an attempt to track the individual history of an anonymous sailor, by reconstructing or even re-creating his figure, Branas tries to read these processes in an individual, singular way. The artist’s narrative can be interpreted in the context of contemporary geopoetics. Looking at the photographs through the prism of his own self, his own travel experiences, his desires and feelings, the artist incarnates the allegorical figure of a sailor and, once again, re-creates the figure of a homo viator roaming the expanses of dystopia.