Cut It Short

‘We come from a little town of more or less four thousand people, in the southern edge of Poland. This is the place where twenty years ago, both of us were coming of age. It was nothing unusual, growing up is a process everyone goes through and there are certain things we all must encounter and discover at some point or another, and people of a certain generation find themselves going through the same fads and trends as fashion, attitudes and politics enter our awareness, well, at least that’s what we think…
…All that counted was our friendship and our dreams. And always, while listening to another new CD, somewhere in between the first and second bottle of cheap wine, that absolute certainty of having our lives under control was coming back. Time had stopped. But, before we learned the rules of the game, it was already over. Fate pushed to the front row unannounced. It wasn’t the first time fate had played unfairly. We happened to choose different schools, we started to eat burgers and to visit hairdressers from time to time. Both of us went to find our own happiness far from the little town we once used to call ‘home’.

The project ‘Cut It Short’ is a collaboration between Michal Solarski and Tomasz Liboska. It is a visual reconstruction of their youth spent in a little town in Southern Poland. It’s an autobiographical story about transition between boyhood and adulthood, about friendship, and the passing of time.
The title ‘Cut it Short’ refers to the old tradition in Slavic cultures called ‘Postrzyzyny’. Young boys have their hair cut in order for them to enter society, a ‘coming of age’ of sorts. The custom is still being practiced in some circles as a kind of symbol of obeying the rules.