VOTUM

For me, VOTUM was the biggest project of this volunteering year, and in many ways, it summarizes the whole experience for me.

It was a multidisciplinary exhibition bringing together video, photography, performance, and fashion in one experience. The project questions the patterns, beliefs, and “truths” that we carry with us, many of which don’t even belong to us. Yet, through habit or comfort, we carry them as if they were our own.

In many ways, this project reflects my year here. And it was important for me to bring it out into the world, specifically during this year and here in Poland.

As a Portuguese person living in Poland, I don’t understand Polish. When we live in a country where we cannot fully understand the language around us, we can end up spending a lot of time inside our own heads. And if we pay enough attention, we can start identifying patterns of thought that have been blocking us from feeling happier, freer, or more connected.

In my case, I often felt like an outsider in this country. I felt that people were staring at me or finding me strange, weird. Sometimes, when I interacted with someone, it felt like an uncomfortable moment for both of us, and my immediate instinct was to escape.

But eventually, I realized that I was the one creating many of these situations through an internal dialogue I had been carrying for years:

“I don’t belong here. I’m taking up too much space.”

This thought didn’t really belong to me. Most likely, someone told me something similar when I was younger, and at some point I adopted it as if it were my own truth.

And this is what VOTUM explores: the truths we inherit, absorb, and eventually mistake for our own.

The word VOTUM means vow, a promise or commitment. For me, this project became a kind of vow to myself: a commitment to bring my truth to the outside world. Not the truth I was taught to believe, not the truth created by fear or habit, but my own, genuine truth.

Creating VOTUM in Poland, during this particular year of my life, became a way of making that internal process visible, and of finally giving myself permission to take up space.