The “Machines for Living” exhibition is not about one of the many anonymous social modernist housing estates. The paintings are rooted in a specific place with a very strong historical and visual identity, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate in Warsaw, built in 1965-1972. When the housing estate was built, it was said to be the most beautiful in Warsaw; it was beautiful with the beauty of the new machine. But widespread faults, lack of hot and sometimes even cold water, improper functioning of the sewage system, and lack of heating paralyzed the operation of living machines. Both the crisis of the last years of socialism and the corrective attempts of early capitalism caused the machines to gradually stop working. The basic experience of a long-term stay in one of the three hundred apartments of a concrete block is the festering tension between sameness and differences, repetition and change. When you found yourself in another block of the estate or even on another floor of the same block, everything looked identical to another extruded product from the same factory matrix. However, the greater the similarity, the greater the differences that confused the mind. Each floor smelled a little different; each life was deposited in matter in a different way and had a different impact on the senses. Although the apartments had the same layout and resembled subsequent copies of the same model, each had different traces of life, the effects of different decisions, different imaginations, thoughts, fears, and dreams. The exhibition tells the story of coming of age. Szaweł Płóciennik, as a father, goes back to his childhood and tells himself and us the changes that took place in his mind and body while growing up. It is a story in which the changing hero is accompanied by the changing world. The series of works is a kind of private mythology. Visually, the images may evoke associations with surrealism, but they are strictly anchored in reality, and the extraordinary is generated as a result of deformations made by memory. The monolithic structure of social modernist blocks of flats and housing machines erodes under the subtle influence of individual affects. Machines for Life is an exhibition about what does not fit into the pattern, about what becomes visible in contrast to the soulless rhythm of windows, about emotions and clumsiness, about life that slips out of shape, and finally about the power of a story that saves an individual in a dehumanized world.