Alicja Dobrucka
‘I like you, I like you a lot’ (2009)

‘Death is radically resistant to the order of representation. Representations of death are misrepresentations or rather representations of an absence.’ Simon Critchley

After the immediacy of pain so the harsh rawness of fact and detail gives way to impression, traces that linger on, spaces that resonate with shifting memories and changing recollections.

One of the versions of the myth about Narcissus is that his sister who he loved very much dies unexpectedly in unknown circumstances. Unable to come to terms with the loss he searches for the traces of her in the places they used to visit together.
‘I like you, l like you a lot ‘ is a part of an ongoing practice, documenting a personal experience of death and mourning, the camera being consciously employed to explore the subject of bereavement.

The resultant work is a part of a grieving process. There is a gradual ebb and flow, a slow transition over time: it is a search for presence in the absence, creating affect rather than a narrative, sense rather than story.

The photographs show vacuous vistas and locations, some of which are repeated to portray the shifts of perspective and detail reminiscent of the cyclic yet changing nature of loss: memories are visited over and over, images, words recur again and again, scenes and conversations replayed. And then eventually the day to day is lost, to a presiding feeling rather than to any one thing; memory becomes sensation.

‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.’ Franz Kafka