Olja Simčič Jerele

In the yard of my childhood home there are two trees. There were two trees.

Late in the summer, my mother called and told me that during a storm, one of them had fallen into the neighbours vegetable garden. “A gust of wind came and ripped it straight out the ground.”

Two weeks later I am sitting in the yard, watching as two workers begin to cut down the other tree.

The almond is very old and a little sick. “What if it falls on our house?”, my mother worries.

Every spring during my childhood, the almond tree shed its white blossoms and I watched as they fell down on the green grass like snow. Today in this late summer of my twenties the white blossoms are replaced by fresh sawdust.

When the almond tree is cut down and the smell of sawdust is no longer so present in the air, I walk up to its trunk and start counting its rings. I’m not good at counting. I always forget where I left off. But I have to count to the end anyway.

This summer, my childhood ended. “Let everything that no longer serves me go with it.”

But it remained.

In her ongoing master’s thesis the artist presents photography as an inherently nostalgic medium. Photographs are unreliable narrators of the past, unable to reproduce moments as they actually occurred. They are not fixed at the moment of creation – their physicality slowly ages and decays. This decay sometimes appears as the silver mirroring effect, creating a silvery shimmer in the darkest areas of the photograph. While photographers and conservators try to prevent or remove this effect, the artist deliberately triggers and accelerates this slow-moving process.

The aesthetics of decay become an inseparable part of the image, distancing the viewer from the moment of the images creation and presenting it as a fictional past – a past that never existed as it appears in the photograph. Failed attempts to reproduce the past thus lead to the creation of something new, inaccessible in reality.

The artist explores the tension between the fictional past and the soon-to-be fictional present by juxtaposing images and objects connected to her childhood home (she displays an image of her self-made tattoo of her home address, the not long ago cut down trunk of a tree from the yard of her childhood home and a sound recording of her attempting and failing to date the trunk by counting its rings) and her new home in Vienna - a place to which she had no prior connection to, but which is nevertheless being overtaken by nostalgia (medium format negatives taken during her stay show small specks of the silver mirroring effect as does the print of a neon sign located near her new apartment).

The artist connects the inescapable fate of the photographic medium to its inherent nostalgia that she desperately tries to escape in both her personal life and her photographs, but which stubbornly returns no matter where she goes.

Olja Simčič Jerele (SI, 1999) is a visual artist currently completing her MA in photography at Academy of Fine Arts and Design Ljubljana. In recent years, she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Slovenia and abroad. In 2024, she won the Photon Gallery’s Different Worlds 2024 open call, in 2025 she won the DLUM Primavera Listina and was one of the recipients of the Prešeren Student Award for the exhibition project Ponjava 4.