My First Immortality. Séance / Studio Wachowicz/Fret

give children language, but do not teach them your verses
give them movement, but do not let them practice old dances
give them sounds, but do not play them your music
give them light, but do not give them images
and above all, before they open their eyes for the first time, burn all photographs

Attempting to reject any image and any narrative, we are unable to express how much "My First Immortality" owes to Agnes, the protagonist of Milan Kundera's novel "Immortality". At the same time, we do not attempt to hide that Séance was born from fascination with the works of Francesca Woodman, a photographer and performer who made the understanding of Essence—transparent as a photographic membrane—the meaning of both her brief life and her sudden, self-chosen death.

In the domain of optics, transparency is a physical property that enables light to pass through a material without scattering. Transparency is one of the fundamental properties of liquids—substances capable of transmitting light rays through their infinite layers. The opposite concept is turbidity. When we are born, our bodies consist of eighty percent water. Our transparency diminishes year after year, as if, moving away from sources toward light, we become clouded.

In "My First Immortality" we descend into the depths of transience and transparency of our bodies—all bodies—and simultaneously their preserved image, their eternal (non)presence, where Eros and Thanatos intertwine into one. We do not trust the age of photography, the age of light's work, which in being born brought the greatest crimes in human history and seemingly unwittingly preserved them for posterity, for an unprecedented idolatry of evil—and idolatry of gazing upon its image endlessly, as if our gazing replaced God himself.

And if we are composed of a series of adjacent layers, membranes, skins, whose interweaving we perceive as our own body—photography draws these layers together. It cuts what was wrongly glued together.