Photos and Text by Izabela Jurcewicz

In my performative and therapeutic process of dealing with memories and tensions written in the body, photography takes a crucial role. I was an inter-organ tumor patient, one of 300 cases worldwide, where science had few answers to the cause and how to proceed. This experience of a patient being ‘on view,’ researched and scanned, coined my relationship with the camera and ways of seeing a human.

Izabela Jurcewicz
Sitting Up (After my Father)

I spent weeks in hospital, stabilized after the internal bleeding and awaiting my first surgery. The first procedure lasted nine hours. Being cut and left open for so long changed my body at a cellular level, leaving signs of stress and anxiety connected to the threat of survival. The impact of this surgery exists as a living archive in my body, a photographic negative that produces images, including the ones that form the book that came out as an aftermath of these experiences. Deep somatic memory is called to visibility in my work, externalized through the photographic surface.

In this work I replace the invasive surgical instrument with my camera as a receptive device to register, merge and enable a ritual of healing. To synchronize the level of knowledge in my body and mind, I began re-performing the trauma under my conditions and re-writing my memories. The practice of requesting the body and self to be ‘in tune’ opens a dual process: a spiraling inward toward the past and a reclamation of my inherent life force.

It is this process of emphatic engagement that brings dimensionality to the body and self again and grows a capacity to join with the suffering of others. From my work I than see my Father, supporting him through his own cycle of trauma, as he had cancer from 2016 to 2019.

"Body as a Negative. Sensations of Return" was just published by Yoffy Press and is available here.