ALLEL – Dagmara Bugaj

Things consist of layers arranged one after the other like an onion, and taking photos is not about creating new images, but about removing the epidermal layer from reality. At least that’s what Honoré de Balzac suspected, and that’s why he was afraid to undergo daguerreotyping. If this is true, each photograph would be a layer of reality recorded on paper, embalmed – a kind of mummified space-time. However, things are more than their external appearances, their essence is deeply hidden and withdrawn. The meaning of “taking views” was to “immortalize”, i.e. to take out of time and space the fleeting states whose photographic shadows were supposed to outlive their originals. The metaphor of a frozen shadow is older than photography and appears in literature since ancient times. Shadow is a natural projection, a negative of reality, a natural form of imaging underlying the idea of ​​representation, so important to photography. Leonardo Da Vinci claimed that shadow is stronger than light because it allows us to see the world in three dimensions, as solids in space. It is the shadow of the Anthropocene – the Anthropocene, as Andrzej Marzec calls it, that allows us to see the reality of the climate catastrophe. This is the reality of the great extinction. There is a familiar note of the millennium apocalypse that never came. We’ve been through this before, getting used to the end of a world that never existed. And yet the end comes every now and then. Every few minutes a species becomes extinct, some of which we will never know they existed. Over 500 species of vertebrates disappeared in the 20th century. In 2022, 17,000 animal species became extinct. As a result of background extinctions or major catastrophes, entire ecosystems have disappeared from our planet, leaving only thin geological layers. As a consolation, we got the Anthropocene – an impudent concept confirming that we, humans, are behind this contaminated epidermis of the planet. Unfortunately, microplastics penetrate deeper layers of sediments, which will make dating impossible for foreign archaeologists in the future

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Dagmara Bugaj finds objects of little importance, of little significance, trivial, insignificant and seemingly on a small scale. It is not satisfied with flat images of things, containing only information about the directions and intensity of electromagnetic waves within the range available to our eyes. He reaches for objects in themselves and transforms them into capsules that, while remaining immanent to each other, represent and illustrate transcendent phenomena – hyperobjects such as global warming. The author seems to follow the advice of Timothy Morton, who states: “If we want a thought different from the present, we must direct our thought towards art.” Experience through art is perhaps the only possibility of consciously “touching” a hyperobject with all its stickiness, non-locality, irregular wavering, phasing and interobjectivity. The traces of dying trees are alien, as if not intended for the eyes. Even if our human access to things is limited, Bugaj does not exclude the possibility of other insights; her action is an attempt to point to a post-anthropocentric perspective. Art allows you to see with a foreign gaze – perhaps as moths, whales or slime molds see – to break out of the cognitive bubble into the world of fragile, alien “umvelts”. To believe, you have to touch, as Saint did. Thomas. Looking is infected with a violent attitude towards the world, we need a more complete experience, strange, twisted and looped. The sights of dying trees alone are not enough to understand that we are dying out and that we should watch our shadows more carefully.

PS. The above text, intentionally devoid of footnotes, is not intended to explain to you what you are supposed to experience and how to understand it. It is a record of a personal experience. Yours may be completely different.

Marek Domański