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What does it mean when you have to pick up and go, when you are forced to leave everything behind? In What We Left Behind, Julia Medyńska explores the complexity that arises when all that one has known shifts beneath one's feet and the burden of loss mingles with the innate need for future possibilities. If there is a looking back, there is also a conjuring of a place not yet encountered, its construction only visible in the mind’s eye.
Born in communist Poland, Medyńska fled the Eastern Bloc at age five with her mother, bound for West Germany. This early experience of erasure and …