In this project, I combined photos from the family archive of my husband’s expeditions to Antarctica with pictures I took in Iceland, many years later, to show the state of déjà vu*, which I experienced.
When I found myself in Iceland, I understood why they are attracting to themselves and then do not let go of places like Antarctica. Iceland became for me a place of experience, which unexpectedly made me turn to traumatic memories.
The continent, the idea of which for me consisted of the stories and letters of a loved one, the photographs brought by it and the play of my imagination, eventually took my husband, who was a polar researcher and oceanologist, from me. After two wintering in a row, he returned home with undermined health and soon died.
This project is a reflection on the absence, but also an attempt to recover what I lost. The underlying expectation of the meeting and the resulting void from the understanding of its impossibility, involuntary replacement – the place, person. My desire to understand and accept the past, how it remains in my memory.
* déjà vu – a state accompanied by depersonalization: reality becomes vague and unclear, it forks and partly as if transferred to the past, the reality of the personality in the moment here and now is denied. It is believed that a possible cause of the phenomenon of deja vu can be a change in the way the time is encoded by the brain. At the same time, the process is easiest to present as simultaneous coding of information as “present” and “past” with simultaneous experience of these processes.
