
Wierzba Estery / Esther's Willow
public project, 2018-ongoing
created with Katarzyna Sala and Marta Sala
Esther’s Willow is a collaboration between artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman for Chrzanów (PL), a half-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. The artists have engaged with local and regional institutions, cultural workers, residents, and Jewish descendants and survivors of Chrzanów to replant a white willow sapling in the former Esther’s Square.
the replanting, 2022
Esther’s Square, named as such in the 1920s, had been a locus of Jewish institutional life and the site of the Great Synagogue of Chrzanów until its sudden demolition by people in power in 1973, despite the organizing of Jews and other local cultural workers to repair it. The Sala family of Polish Catholic ethnicity had rented an apartment on the now unnamed square for three generations, since 1948, or five years after what is still in Chrzanów tellingly referred to as the “liquidation” of the ghetto, a zone of racial enclosure that included Esther’s Square.
In 2018, Marta witnessed the cutting down of a white willow tree that had towered over the synagogue’s concealed foundations for as long as she could remember. After this, the artists began to think of the willow as having mourned the city’s destruction on its own living, nonhuman terms; a powerful utterance both to the gravestone-like plaque marking the site of the synagogue and to a nearby memorial oak tree, planted the year the willow was cut, marking 100 years of Polish independence, moreover, set in a square constructed shortly after the synagogue's demolition honoring a millennium of Polish culture. The sisters’ collaboration with Sniderman, whose ancestors fled Rzeszów and Jarosław, is born from and meant to contribute to the memory conditions of everyday life in a minor city.
Over 17 months, through experimental video correspondence, public meetings, walks, interviews, workshops, and the slow envisioning of the living memorial and a happening to plant it, the artists grappled to understand a potential rationale and lineage underneath their planting action. They eventually arrived at the traditional cultural-medicinal uses and cosmological meanings of the white willow across time, space, and peoples in Eastern Europe as an ethical-aesthetic guide. The project’s approach then gestures into the city’s traumatic recent past to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland mutually, collaboratively, and differently depended on willows over a millennium to treat viruses, diseases, infertility, unwanted pregnancy, chronic pain, and other conditions more often specific to the bodies of women and children, exchanging knowledge, treatments, practitioners, and patients at a site of nonhuman mourning and visionary power that continues, even nominally (“weeping willow” or “wierzba babilońska”), to mediate between the living and the dead. Here, through what feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska calls a “weak resistance” of the willow and specific willows, we felt the whole population of Chrzanów in time stand equally implicated in the work we had commenced and that commenced us.



















CentrALT, 2022
On 7 July 2022, Katarzyna, Marta, and Sniderman led a silent walk from the Chrzanów train station (where the Jewish population of the city was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau), through the rynek, or market square (where the people were divided into two groups: one to be deported and the other to return to Esther’s Square in the ghetto), ending in the former Esther’s Square, where they planted Esther’s Willow. Able-bodied participants alternated carrying the white willow sapling, and everyone each carried a jar of silent water, a traditional Slavic-Ashkenazi medicinal substance created by drawing and hauling living water between dusk and dawn in silence. Once at the square, the collective planted the sapling with the silent water, followed by spoken words, a psalm, coffee, plum cake, and performance based on the cantorial work of the historical Bakon family, Chrzanów's cantorial legacy, by the Slavoc group, Mojše Band, in this way activating centuries of relations the square remembers.
The route traces in reverse the city’s deportation process under Nazi occupation. Katarzyna and Marta formed the route during the 2020 international COVID lockdown, creating videos in the summer dawns to send to Sniderman so that he could meet the city. He sent them, in turn, audio recordings made, often just after their walks, at night in Whatcom County, the integration of which became the film Naskórek (27'24", 2021/25). Whether Katarzyna and Marta initially intended to trace the deportation route in reverse, the eventual walk carrying Esther’s Willow emerged from their desire to move through, engage with, and know their city in a radically different sense, informed by what they considered to be the centrifugal inception of its lasting destruction.
At one point, during the artists' long-distance exchange, they agreed to work on the project through the figure of naskórek, a term referring to the thinnest, most outer layer of skin, translated less easily into English as the more technical epidermis or more esoteric scarfskin. Marta had used the word to describe her experience painting and sewing with textile refuse. Here, naskórek signified that sliver, that edge, of subjects, entities, and architectures perpetually touching, surfacing against another—human and nonhuman, dead and alive, deported and settled, immaterial and embodied—with or without consent, with or without intention, at the very periphery of emplacement. If the artists were working, struggling, and intervening with/in anything, together, in and for Chrzanów, it was the terrain of naskórek: "We wanted to concentrate proximities and then breach them as a single substance with footsteps and the sapling and silent water."
In an early workshop for Esther’s Willow, Wojciech Sala—Katarzyna and Marta’s beloved late father and lifelong resident of the former Esther’s Square—advocated for a way to extend the project’s presence in the city beyond the singular happening, posing the question, “What stays there?” Since the planting of Esther’s Willow, the artists and their partners in Chrzanów and Kraków have continued to work together, maintaining and forming relationships rooted in the project's participatory, transcultural, and feminist ethos, by facilitating a current of other happenings, public markers, workshops, exhibitions, a music record, films, and publications mindful of local and translocal dialogue and interdependence.
Video produced by FestiVALT. Credits included in the video.
Exhibition History
2025, 'Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman: Walking in Ethnocidal Places', Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
2024, 'Wierzba Estery / Esther's Willow', MultiMemo: Multidirectional Memory, Remembering for Social Justice / Municipal Public Library of Chrzanów, Chrzanów, Poland
2022, 'Wierzba Estery / Esther's Willow' (with Katarzyna Sala, Marta Sala), 6th FestivALT: Arkhiv / CentrALT, Kraków, Poland
2021, '5th FestivALT: New Realities and Possible Futures', Galicia Jewish Museum, Kraków, Poland



Audain Gallery, 2025
Publications by the artists
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, "A Willow (Grave) That Knows a Felled Willow (Mourner) That Knew an Eradicated Square (Woman)" in Thinking through the Museum: Exhibiting Theory Volume #2: Difficult Heritage in an Age of Crises: A Guide to New Models for Sustainability, Community, and Engagement. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2025 (forthcoming)
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, "Using Salicin" in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology. Maryville: GreenTower Press / The Laurel Review, 2023
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, "A Willow (Grave) That Knows a Felled Willow (Mourner) That Knew an Eradicated Square (Woman)" in The Hopkins Review: Traversals, a folio on walking. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2023
Robet Yerachmiel Sniderman, "Wierzba (grób), która zna ściętą wierzbę (żałobnik), która znała wykorzeniony plac (kobieta)" (A Willow (Grave) That Knows a Felled Willow (Mourner) That Knew an Eradicated Square (Woman)) trans. Joanna Figiel in Zielone Upamiętnianie: W stronę nowych strategii pamiętania w przestrzeni publicznej (Green Commemoration: Toward new strategies for remembering in public spaces), Kraków: FestivALT, 2022
Artist Talks
2025, "Un(re)mapping Sites of Difficult Histories: A Conversation Between Nastaran Saremy and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman", Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman: Walking in Ethnocidal Places, Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada
2023, "Art, Activism, Memory' (with Omer Krieger, Tomer Zirkilevich, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Natalia Romik), Art Activism Memory: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Difficult Heritage, NeDiPa (Negotiating Difficult Pasts Project) / POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, Poland
2023, "Green Commemorations: Marta Sala (Esther's Willow), Jason Francisco (Medicinal Plants of Plaszow) and Daniela Molnar (Pigmentation)", 7th FestivALT: doykayt, Targowa2, Kraków, Poland
2023, 'Planting Esther's Willow" (with Katarzyna Sala), Baltisher Limmud, Limmud Europe, online




Press, Interviews
“Comemoração verde e prática não-invasiva – o caso de ‘O Salgueiro da Ester'” (Green commemoration and non-invasive practice – the case of “Esther’s Willow”) by Cheong Kin Man (Buala, 18/07/23)
波蘭的綠色紀念——種一棵樹的意義 (Green Memorial in Poland – The Meaning of Planting a Tree) by Cheong Kin Man (The New Lens, 15/7/23)
再遊波蘭小鎮山樂乎有感 (Visiting the Polish Town of Chrzanów Again) by Cheong Kin Man (Fantasia Macau, 30/5/23)
“Drzewa zamiast pomników. Czym jest ‘zielone upamiętnienie’?” (Trees instead of monuments. What is a “green commemoration”?) by Jutyna Nowicka (Radio Kraków, 2/8/23)
以斯帖的柳樹——在波蘭小鎮植一棵樹 (Esther’s Willow – Planting a Tree in a Portland Town) by Cheong Kin Man (The New Lens, 3/9/22)
以斯帖的柳樹 (Esther’s Willow) by Cheong Kin Man (Fantasia Macau, 24/8/22)
“O Salgueiro da Ester” (Esther’s Willow) by Cheong Kin Man (Jornal Tribuna de Macau, 20/7/22)
“Le saule d’Esther” (Esther’s Willow) by Cheong Kin Man (Buala, 22/9/22)
“Na dawnym placu Estery posadzono symboliczną wierzbę” (A symbolic willow tree was planted in the former Esther Square) (Chrzanowska Telewizja Lokalna, 4/7/22)
“94-letni Abraham Wasserteil zapłakał nad Wierzbą Estery w Chrzanowie” (94-year-old Abraham Wasserteil wept over Esther’s Willow Willow in Chrzanów) by Łukasz Dulowski (Przełom Tygodnik Ziemi Chrzanowskiej, 30/7/22)
Zaproszenie na Festivalt w Chrzanowie (Invitation to Festivalt in Chrzanow) (Chrzanowska Telewizja Lokalna, 30/6/22)
澳視覺人類學者歐洲展成果 (Macau visual anthropologist presents works in Europe) Macao Daily News, 9th July 2022
“Criar raízes culturais” (Creating cultural roots) (Hoje Macau, 4th July 2022);
Macau visual anthropologist presents artwork in collaboration with Polish artist in Europe (The Macau Post Daily, 7th July 2022).
Municipal Public Library of Chrzanów, 2024
Credits
Directors: Marta Sala, Katarzyna Sala, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
Producers: FestivALT, Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Museum, Municipal Center of Culture, Sport and Recreation of Chrzanów, Urban Memory Foundation, and Fundacja Zapomniane with funding under the "NeDiPa – Negotiating Difficult Pasts" project, implemented in the framework of the program Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV), supported by the European Union
Artistic Collaborators: Cheong Kin Man, Śomi Dominika Śniegocka, Hayden Daley, Rachel Pafe, and Anna Schapiro
Research support: Dr. Marek Tuszewicki and Aleksandra Kumala
Translation support: Joanna Figiel, Piotr Mierzwa, and Ewa Wegrzyn.
Special thanks: Sharon Wasserteil, Avraham Wasserteil, Monika Głuska, Ana Sala, and Wojciech Sala z"l
Replanting photography: Stan Baranski
Archival photograph courtesy of Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Museum of Chrzanów
CentraALT opening photography: Stan Baranski
CentrALT photography: Irena Kalicka
Audain Gallery photography: Rachel Topham Photography






Collaborators' Biographies
Based in Berlin, Katarzyna Sala co-creates literary + artistic projects, focusing on culture of memory, contemporary literature + intersections of literature, art, + social affairs. Projects include Work break in Görli. Artistic relations systems in public space 2021/2022, Û∞-Berlîn Eine kreativ-anarchistische urbane Flucht-Chronik 2020, + the poetry anthology, Kurdish Voices from Rojava / Dengên helbestvanên kurd ji Rojava.
Marta Sala is a transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin who often works in collaboration with groups + individuals. She focuses on issues such as intersectionality, right to the city, ecology + the commons + explores waste, marginalization and solidarity in diversity. Her artistic practice includes painting, installation, sewing, costume design, video, performance, participatory + public art.