give children language, but do not teach them your poems

give them movement, but do not let them rehearse your 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

In attempting to reject every image and every narrative, we still cannot fully express how much My First Immortality owes to Agnes, the protagonist of Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality. At the same time, we make no attempt to conceal that our Séance emerged from a fascination with and inspiration drawn from the work of Francesca Woodman – the brilliant photographer and performer who made the pursuit of an Essence as transparent as photographic film the purpose of both her short life and her sudden, self-chosen death.

In optics, transparency is the physical property that allows light to pass through a material without scattering. Transparency is one of the defining characteristics of liquids – substances capable of transmitting light through their seemingly infinite layers. While the transparency of surface waters may vary, groundwater usually remains transparent. Its opposite is turbidity. At birth, the human body consists of roughly eighty percent water. Year by year, our transparency diminishes, as though, in moving away from our source “towards the light”, we gradually become opaque.

In My First Immortality, we descend into the depths of transience and the transparency of our bodies – of all bodies – and at the same time into their preserved images, their eternal (non)presence, where Eros and Thanatos intertwine into one. We do not trust the age of photography, the age of the labour of light, which at the moment of its birth also brought about some of the greatest crimes in human history, while almost inadvertently preserving them for posterity – fuelling an unprecedented idolatry of evil. And an idolatry of endlessly looking at its image, as though our gaze itself could replace God.

And if we are made of adjoining layers, shells and skins whose interweaving we perceive as our own body, then photography strips these layers away – cutting apart what was wrongly fused together in the act of birth – in order to surrender it to immortality by inflicting death upon this fragile оболочка of shadow that has just fallen into the trap of light. Photography is the skin stripped from my body. It is an album of epidermises carried away by light. When I photograph, I look at myself dead.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of photographs taken since the invention of photography. There have probably been tens of trillions. Every single day we take around five billion photographs – fifty-seven thousand images every second.

I imagine the newspapers of the future without a single word, sentence or report of murders, pogroms, rapes or accidents. No dates. No times. No locations. And above all, no photographs – only delicate watercolour drawings of the eyes of witnesses who were there, in whose eyes everything we need to understand is reflected. And we understand it immediately, and forever.

Co-financed by the City of Poznań budget #poznanwspiera

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund – a state earmarked fund