Nobody Important, No One Else
Moving from St. Petersburg to Minsk in 2014 turned to be painful for me. I felt like staying indoors and was reluctant about looking for a job and mixing up with new people – I was literally stuck in the past. I was looking back at 5 years spent in St. Petersburg as the best period of my life, which will hardly ever happen again. By idealizing the past, in my memories I kept returning to my loved ones and friends who stayed in St. Petersburg. After my moving to Minsk I could see them not more than just a few times in a year. I was afraid that the connection which had been born between us risked to disappear. What if due to this gap between us they would change so much that I would not be able to recognize in them someone I used to love? What if the obsession with our common perfect past would not let me go further, grow, develop,… mature, accept their “updated” versions next time we meet. Friendship is not appropriation, but photography is perfectly capable of providing me with a “save for myself”-function. Photographs of my friends preserve memories and at the same time they intensify the feeling of loss.
In the project Nobody Important, No One Else I explore the elusive state of time and the person in it – the moment when the present becomes the past; that very degree of the presence of past in every moment of “here and now”. I give a careful look at close people and things that surround them with a mixed feeling of fear, anxiety and determination. I am afraid that I will not be able to keep up with a crazy run of time, I fear time will subjugate everything too dramatically. But at the same time I try to accept irreversible changes in myself and the others. Photography helps me to delineate the personal boundaries of “homeland”, to determine what exactly in me and my loved ones is able to remain unchanged.
Kate Smuraga (1990) is a young photographer from Vitebsk, Belarus. She graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts (Russia) where she studied Art History, Theory and Criticism. Currently Kate lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
