EXTRACTION by Michał Łuczak

Upper Silesia has been a coal region for more than two centuries. Hard coal shaped its towns, its skylines, its labor cultures, its air. Since 1989, that foundation has been eroding — steadily, mine by mine, as deposits run out or seams sink too deep to be worth the cost. The Polish government has set 2049 as the date of final closure.

Michał Łuczak was born here and still lives here, in a house that tilts. The slant is measurable, though the family has long stopped noticing it. Outside, the pavement is slowly sinking. Across the street, a spoil tip — a mound of mining waste colonized by pioneer plants — waits to be hauled off for road fill. These are not metaphors. They are the physical grammar of a landscape hollowed out from below, still settling. In winter, the air is visible.

Extraction is Łuczak's photographic account of this place — its surface and its subsurface logic, its architecture and its atmosphere, its people inside a slow industrial reckoning. The work does not position itself outside the problem: Łuczak's own household burns what is marketed as "eco-pea" coal in the basement boiler. What the photographs track is a landscape caught in an unfinished sentence — not yet post-industrial, no longer simply industrial.