Riding a bike through the courtyard between the blocks of flats, you went hard into the bend on the asphalt path. Sudden braking left a tyre mark, and its sound, a squeal really, faded into the hubbub of the estate playground, dissolved among the swings, the pitch, the roundabout, the carpet-beating rack. A few weeks later the narrow black mark blended into the surface of the pavement. Well over a decade later the noise was replaced by silence.

But the school bell means the end of lessons, and afterwards we will always meet in the courtyard. We will get on our bikes and leave marks. Someone will draw a little heart … in chalk on the asphalt.

Tomasz Jakub Motyka

Photographer, playwright, cultural anthropologist. He graduated from the University of Warsaw and the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. He works in documentary, creative and portrait photography. Resident of Foto Pracownia Wschodnia.

"Po lekcjach" [After School] is a visual development of the themes of the memory of places and urban spaces connected with the political transformation in Poland in the 1990s, on which he works in the fields of photography and writing for the theatre.