Iwona Suszycka, "No Algorithm"

Who Am I? I’ve been asking myself this question all my adult life. It was written in my pedigree to be a strict scientific mind and behave as such. Right from the start, I have been dressed in a well-tested family algorithm. There was no room for my own decisions. This code, worked out to perfection by generations of mathematicians, was to last unchanged for centuries. The flow had to work flawlessly. Start-Stop. Processing complete, time for the next generation of… mathematicians. Thanks to this, I understand well what a person trapped in an identity imposed by others experiences, who breaks out of it and discovers, by all possible methods... the real self. The „No Algorithm” cycle is a multithreaded story built on my own self-portraits. Giving it this common denominator, I mark my subjective and emotional attitude to the form of presenting this material. This is my biography. Each presented character in these images, awards that part of me that did not fit into the archetype of a respective and serious mathematician. And yet, secretly, I created them within me. By creating this material, I give myself permission to openly be myself. A mistake in someone else's algorithm. The presented material was created with the use of mixed techniques (archival photographs, also from family archives, re-photographing, setup staging/self-performance photography). The Bronze VanDyke technique used portrays my, (after all) bond with theancestral past. The same one that imposed and expected me to live the... algorithm.