How can
nostalgia become a stronghold in a world where we experience a loss of control
daily in various areas of life? How do we relate to this special evocation of
the past at the border between virtual and real life? Can technology now once
again revolutionize the way we archive memories and recall the past? How is the
medium of photography expanding in line with the spirit of the times?
The concept of nostalgia has undergone several
transformations since the seventeenth century, with the meaning of the term
moving from a spatial to a temporal nostalgia and focusing on meaningful
experiences of the past of an individual or community. Nostalgia has now become
a defense mechanism of the psyche, a complex, ambivalent emotional state that
is difficult to define, despite the fact that it is a familiar and recurring
experience in our everyday lives. It is fundamentally a personal experience,
but also a social sentiment, the visual representation of which has developed
strong and regularly repeated visual patterns over the decades. The
unpredictability of our time, recent global events, accelerating technological
development and alienated human presence have given the concept an additional
layer of meaning, which calls for a search for new ways of photographic
representation from a new perspective.
Using personal nostalgia and passages of
self-discovery, I seek new tools and ways of visual expression that allow me to
capture the peculiar atmosphere of postmodern nostalgia, its function of
masking and embellishing negative experiences, and the grotesque, anxious
feeling that we often see this notion today not as an opportunity but as a
compulsively evoked point of reference.
