Apapachar
Sabrina Stercki
Ghent, Belgium
About
Sabrina Stercki is a photography student at KdG Hogeschool in Antwerp. In her work, you can see that she creates introspective, conceptual and cross-media work. From a poetic and visual approach, she works with photography, textile, video and sound to make personal experiences tangible. She is currently working on a short film about her own grieving process, in which she uses her own images and archival material to bring memories, reality and feelings into images.
Project
In this short film, I journey through my own thoughts and subconscious. As a photographer, I want to visualize the complex reality of grief, challenge assumptions about mourning, and let the image resonate with a sense of loss that others can experience. Grief is always an unfinished past, endlessly mulling over what could have been different, reconstructing situations so they might have turned out differently, wanting to keep the end unending.
Along the way, I have a travel companion who is no longer here. A travel companion who was present before my birth, and should have been at every important moment in my life. A travel companion I must create myself, must piece together from repressed memories and images from the past.
In the Western world, the loss of someone from our lives has become impersonal; paperwork, conventions, coffee tables and ceremonies postpone the processing. Life must go on, above all, after the other's death. Suddenly, several months after the loss, I found myself facing a space between me and my memories that seemed unbridgeable. I had to search for a way to connect my experience now and then beyond the language and words we normally use. Through space, atmosphere, light, rhythm, sound and grain, I visualize the reconciliation between what is past and what seems to be present.
