ENTRY DESCRIPTION
One of the important impulses that drove me to create this photograph was the note made in 2010 by the Australian journalist Joe Chandler. In her intriguing text she expresses the emotions experienced when visiting the Polish-Soviet A.B. Dobrowolski Polar Station in Antarctica. Fascinated by the report and the underpinning mystery, I started to create an archive comprising different materials regarding Polish polar expeditions from the years 1958–1979. The exhaustive search for information, reports and photographic documentation helped me ascertain the chronology of events and the reasons why the station was abandoned by subsequent expeditions. The journals of polish scientists are filled with personal afterthoughts, a synthesis of visual images, mental states and literary sensitivity, whereby which show the same place in different ways. A diorama based on the photographs has proven a particularly useful tool. Through intensive stimulation of all senses, its threedimensionality and tangibility gave me the “feeling of participation”. A small portion of the White Land gained a new technical representation in the form of a spatial model created using digital tools and a computer-controlled miller.

AUTHOR
Jakub Wawrzak (b. 1989 in Torun, Poland) graduated from the Nicolaus Copernicus University, Department of Fine Arts. In 2014 he started his job as an assistant in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz. In 2017 he got a position as assistant in the Department of Graphic Art at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. In 2018 he received his PhD degree in fine arts (NCU). In his art-research project he investigates the phenomenon of reception of diorama, with particular emphasis on the phenomenon of immersion and virtual images. The problem of the interference of magical-mythical thinking in the way of daily functioning takes a particular place in his work. His artistic activity is mainly connected with photography, film and interdisciplinary art.

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