Soft Spot by Michalina Kacperak

Photographs by Michalina Kacperak
Drawings by Zosia Kacperak

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Once you leave the house, the lesson begins again. Speaking, thinking, loving. A vocabulary of concepts: me, Mom, Dad, sister, home. I unpick, bit by bit, then weave it all together again, in a different way.

A hybrid photobook with embedded nutshell zines, Soft Spot is photographs, project sketches, and text by artist Michalina Kacperak, twined with drawings, mini zines, and a tale by Zosia Kacperak.

Through family portraits, fantastical scenography, marginalia, and sheaves of drawings, Soft Spot chronicles the efforts of the Polish artist’s younger sister, Zosia, sixteen years her junior, to weave a bedroom cocoon for herself within a family apartment in which the poison of paternal alcoholism “leaks into more than one liver.” Zosia, insulating her habitat with stuffed animals, turns her bedroom walls into cave paintings of cartoon characters, while seeking an escape from the labyrinth through storytelling.

Michalina, in the role of artist-as-big-sister and de facto guardian in a context of parental codependency, collaborates with her whole, recovering family to assemble photographic sets—Seussian safe-rooms cushioned by polychromatic putty and ponies, in which rocks are allies, molecules glitter, and doodling is fundamental.

Each copy of Spot Spot comes tucked into a cardboard box with embossed title. The boxes are a functional tribute to the shoeboxes and biscuit tins chock-full of talismans that a child keeps under their bed or in the closet. Those sacrosanct archives of childhood.

What can you do? Glue the cracks, prop it up. It will hold for a moment before falling apart. Photograph it forever.

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From Michalina Kacperak’s afterword to Soft Spot:

These photographs were taken, between 2021 and 2024, in my parents’ apartment. More specifically, in my little sister Zosia’s bedroom. What was most real in that apartment were the things imagined in her room.

Soft Spot is the result of a three-year process of returning home; of attempting to come to terms with the illnesses in our family—my father’s alcoholism and our individual emotional disorders; and of re-establishing contact with those closest to me, myself included.

Each of the members of my family—my three sisters and my parents—accompanied me in their own way. Without their collaboration, everything would look different.

My youngest sister, Zosia, sixteen years my junior, shared herself and a piece of her childhood so that I could tell this story.

Zuzia, six years older than Zosia, was present for most of the photographs and built the room’s scenography alongside us. Her portraits also appear in the book.

While Joanna, two years younger than me, did not take part in the process of making the photographs, many of the memories I write about we experienced together. Our lives have overlapped.

Eventually, my father joined us, willingly.

And toward the end of the project, I managed to photograph the most painful relationship, and the sole portrait of my mother came into being.

The drawings in this book are by Zosia Kacperak, my greatest inspiration. The sketches and handwritten notes for the photographs are my own.

—Michalina Kacperak

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2026
Edition of 1,000
Bilingual English–Polish edition
88 pages, paperback, 17×21.5 cm, b&w offset, sewn & glued
Printed on Magno Volume 150, Lux Cream 1.8 90, and Curious Metallics Rose Gold
Designed by Kaja Gliwa
Core design concept by Ania Nalecka-Milach
ISBN 978-83-68165-08-1