In The First March of Gentlemen, Rafal Milach creates a fictitious narrative composed of authentic stories. He retells the historical children's strike in Września, Poland, from the early twentieth century, through collaged archival photographs from the 1950s and 60s. By blending these elements he has created a new narrative, to be read as a playful metaphor for the political situation of the present. The project was created during the Kolekcja Września residency programme. At the turn of the twentieth century, when western Poland was under German occupation, over one hundred students of the Catholic People's School took part in a strike against German influence on their education. When Milach's residency coincided with street demonstrations across Poland, he could not ignore the correlation between past events and the present. The mid-twentieth century in Poland was an oppressive time under the communist regime, and the subjects of these archival photographs by Ryszard Szczepaniak—young men, out of uniform, posing and having fun—were in many ways subversive. Milach cuts and rearranges them, suspending the figures in mid-air, dropping them, levitating them, multiplying them: the gentlemen become both witnesses and protesters, hovering between archive and allegory.