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The store folds into another store, which then turns into a butcher shop – and beyond that – unknown. A club folds into a garage, a garage next into an antique shop ‘Charm of the PRL, Saturday–Sunday 10:00-15:00‘ – now open only on Saturdays and only until 14:00. The woman running it recognizes me easily because I stop by now and then to browse postcards. When asked, she says she doesn’t know much about the pavilion – she only has the account number where the rent needs to be transferred.

A printing house folds into an auto repair shop, then into a restaurant (Indian, then Thai), then into a framing service – further on, it’s impossible to read, as the paint has washed away. Or cracked completely. The remaining fragments on the sign are the last traces of someone’s knack for business. Below, glass doors with a welcome sign – beyond them, nothing and more nothing, dust.

Gold Under the Fingernail is a story of the present, where the backstreets of city life conceal familiar, time-frozen scenes – post-socialist pavilions, prefabricated apartment blocks, piles of discarded furniture waiting for collection. Old dreams, instead of fading away, resurface and linger, waiting to be fulfilled. In this hauntological landscape, promises of a better future, business success, a boom… shimmer – and all of it reflects in the glass façade of yet another newly built skyscraper.

Piotr Maciejowski (born in 1999 in Poznań) creates objects, video works, writes, and paints. He graduated in Intermedia from the University of the Arts in Poznań and in Media Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He also studied at Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Cologne under Prof. Arnold Dreyblatt.  His interests revolve around the echoes of Poland’s political transformation, contemporary socio-economic shifts, and how they intertwine with personal micro-narratives. He frequents antiquarian bookstores, collecting old, often inscribed postcards. As a full-time employee, he takes care of accounting software.

ig: @p.maciejowski