Spotlight: “I would also like to be” by Jenny Rova
Hello Johan,
I'm sorry it has taken me so long. This is not the first time I sit down to write to you, but every time something has interrupted me and it has almost been a relief. I am still quite shaken from the night when we met almost a year ago. I want you to know that this is something I had to do and is in no way a sensation-driven idea. Although the material comes from you or your Facebook page, it really has very little or nothing at all to do with you. I think deep down you know that I would never do anything to hurt you.
The work, "I would also like to be" - A work on jealousy, is part of a process that began with Liebling/ Darling a work where I collected pictures my former boyfriends and lovers have taken of me during our relationship. I put the pictures together in a chronological order to form an expanded self-portrait. After “Liebling/Darling” I worked on a project called "They left me for someone else" for which I put together farewell letters that I have received over the years. In this series I used one of your letters that you wrote to me in Prague. All three works deal with romantic relationships in different ways. They are basically based on very personal material that I rework so that it takes on a fictional and universal quality. The individuals who appear in the images or texts could all be replaced with someone else. Names or statements that could lead to a specific person aren’t used in either the letters or the picture legends and texts. I got the idea for "I would also like to be" when I first was confronted with Facebook. There was something about the images that annoyed me. Suddenly, I saw all sorts of pictures of people whom I had known and been close to once, quite often pictures that the people themselves would have shown me. But there the images are on their own. The owner of the images – the photographer - has no idea in which mood I am when I look at the pictures. They know nothing about who is looking at the pictures and when, and what emotions the pictures may trigger. They give up their rights to the images and also their responsibility for them and their effect on people at the same time. When I look at the pictures, I automatically start comparing them to myself and my own life. You might log onto Facebook on a dark, grey, dull night and see how much fun everyone else is having, how good-looking, happy and how much in love they are, how they travel and live and so on and so forth. And then you think, what if life had been different, what if it had taken a different path?
At the same time the pictures on the internet a possibility. They live their own life. They portray someone's imagination, someone's dream life come true. And that's what I can build on to make them my own. The image of me can do whatever it wants, it can step in anywhere and be whoever it wants. This is what I've done, too. To be close to all possibilities and old loves. In my imagination. In this work. I hope you will understand me.
Jenny
Softcover | 72 pages 41 color and black & white photographs Sewn pamphlet binding First edition 2015 by b.frank books
