Maciej
Strzałkowski
Rajca

A Dead Secret is an old Japanese legend about the ghost of a woman that cannot leave the temporal world. Her son and husband try to let the ghost go, but they do not know how. Eventually, helped by a monk (grandfather), they manage to set the lost soul free.

In my interpretation, I assumed the perspective of a young boy who escapes into the world of imagination in order to cope with his mother’s death. The tansu – a characteristic step chest – becomes a portal to this world, and its interior hides the mother’s secret and, at the same time, a solution to the ghost problem.

The mock-up and dolls were made of various sorts of paper waste, natural fabric and felt, which has a symbolic historical meaning and a purely ecological meaning.