As we try to throw away image and story, we are unable to convey just how much My First Immortality owes to Agnes, the heroine of Milan Kundera’s Immortality. At the same time, we make no secret of the fact that our performance was born out of fascination with the work of Francesca Woodman, a genius photographer and performer who explored the (transparent-as-celluloid) Essence, a quest that imparted meaning to her brief life and her sudden, self-chosen death.
In the realm of optics, transparency is a physical property that makes it possible for light to pass through a material without scattering. It is an essential property of liquids, which are substances that may allow light rays to pass through their infinite layers. Surface water varies in transparency, but most groundwater is fully transparent. The opposite of transparency is turbidity. When we are born, our bodies are made up of 80% water. Then, year by year, we become less and less transparent, as if clouding up as we move away from the sources ‘towards the light’.
In My First Immortality, we descend into the depths of the transience and transparency of our bodies, of all bodies and, at the same time, into the entrenched image of bodies, their eternal (non)presence where Eros and Thanatos merge into one. We don’t trust the era of photography, the era of the work of light, which, in its early days, brought the greatest atrocities in human history and, as if unwittingly, ‘incidentally’ preserved them for posterity, for an unprecedented idolatry of evil. And for the idolatry of gazing endlessly at the image of that evil, as if our gaze has replaced god himself.
What if we are made up of an array of adjacent layers, shells, skins, woven together into what we perceive to be our own body?
Photography strips away these layers – it cuts open what was wrongly glued together at birth to give it to immortality by inflicting death on this flimsy shell of shadow that has just fallen into the trap of light.
Photography is the skin stripped off my body. It is an album of skins transported by light. When I take photographs, I look at my dead self.
It is impossible to pin down an exact figure for the number of photographs taken since the advent of photography. Several trillion seems a likely guess. Every day we take about five billion photographs, 57,000 per second.
I imagine future newspapers without a single word or sentence. With no reports of murders, pogroms, rapes or accidents. With no dates, times or locations. And, most importantly, no photographs – just subtle watercolour sketches of witnesses’ eyes in which everything is reflected. And we understand it at once and forever.
Monika Wachowicz and Jarosław Fret
The screening featured the song “Lament” (based on “Dido’s Lament” from H. Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”), performed by The Tiger Lillies (music by Martyn Jacques, lyrics by Monika Wachowicz), and the song “Forever Together” by The Tiger Lillies, as well as “Santa Maria” by Mireille Mathieu and “Introit Missa Vultum Tuum” by the Corsican band Tempus Fugit. In addition, original audio recordings were used: Antonin Artaud’s “About God’s Judgment” and Paul Celan’s “Psalm” (read by the author), as well as Cesare Pavese’s poem “Death Will Come and Have Your Eyes” translated by Jarosław Mikołajewski, and excerpts from Milan Kundera’s novel “Immortality.”
