Paola Pivi’s Oversized Inflatable Ladder Transforms Grand Palais, Paris.
Pivi’s intervention, playful and jarring, interrupts the classical symmetry of the space
Growing Album – A Living Work by Ewelina Bialoszewska
There’s something quietly moving about the idea of a book that doesn’t end when you close it.
Award winning photographer Ewelina Bialoszewska’s Growing Album is exactly that – a handmade photobook that can be planted in the ground and grown into life. Every page contains seeds, and each one relates to the images printed upon it. Tomatoes, herbs, flowers, plants native to Poland and drawn from her memories of home.
The project began as a personal exploration of identity and belonging. When Ewelina moved from her hometown of Lubań in Poland to Munich at twelve, photography became her way of making sense of new surroundings. It was how she built connection, first with people, then with place.
That instinct still sits at the heart of her work today. Across her projects, she looks to translate memory into something tangible – a physical trace of emotion and everyday life. Her long-term series Motherland does this through photography; Growing Album takes it further, making memory itself something that can root and grow.
To produce the book, she hand-crafted paper from old maps of her hometown and newspaper clippings saved by her grandmother. While the pulp is still damp, she adds seeds gathered from Polish gardens, the same plants that appear within the photographs. She then transfers the images directly onto the paper’s surface, using a printing process that produces soft, almost faded tones – a nod to how memory itself blurs with time.
The pages are bound together with garden cord from her grandmother’s home. Over time, if placed in soil, the paper biodegrades and the seeds germinate, nourished by the material that once held their image. Each book grows differently, shaped by the soil and climate of wherever it’s planted.
There’s deep symbolism in that cycle. A work born from migration that refuses to stay still. A book that turns nostalgia into nurture and a way of re-establishing roots in foreign ground.
At a time when most creative work lives on screens, Growing Album reminds us what happens when concept, material and emotion meet in one living object. It’s storytelling proof that creativity, at its best, grows beyond the artist’s hands.
