The project, developed in collaboration with a group of women who participated in literary workshops at the University of the Third Age, focuses on the stories of two Gdańsk Decembers – those of 1970 and 1981. Both are well known from thousands of official photos. Hasager recalls forgotten stories, tales about everyday life. They are sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic, and are narrated from a female perspective, one that is too often neglected.

Hasager’s approach, which is close to that of the documentary, involves workings primarily with text, audio, video, and photography. Research analysis of this material is both the focus of and the tool used in her work, a search that usually extends onto several levels – both theoretical and empirical. Hasager asks questions about how we arrive at the truth and the possibilities for shaping public discourse, often taking as a starting point interviews and archives, giving equal importance to both ‘official’ material and personal stories. The collected material undergoes ‘artistic processing’, and based on this process, a narrative is constructed that poses questions about the people featured in the work. In this way, the artist shifts the emphasis; she creates an alternate version of history that differs from stories concerning the main actors, focusing instead on the memories of ordinary people. In this way, she tries to fill in gaps in our picture of ‘those times’, supplementing it with aspects of everyday life.

The project is being realized with the help of the Danish Cultural Institute in Warsaw and with support from the Danish Arts Council Committee for Visual Arts.