Emotional intensities are literally distilled in the bottle. Drink to forget, drink to remember. The management of memory is bonded by alcohol and its consumption. Fevered states of happiness inevitably find solace as waves of grief and nostalgia elsewhere, find expression through booze.  

A homesick Polish woman retreats to a pine forest in regional New South Wales to drink her sadness away. A foreigner inhabiting stolen land, she is drinking again to lose a dream that used to be. To describe this plight is to invoke torch song melodramatics that extract romance from misery, pathos from times past. Upon entering a clearing in the bushland where the trees have been cut down, she witnesses a murmuration of starlings. Their beautiful flock formation is like a black cloud shapeshifting across the sky. Remote and alone, her newfound isolation in the wake of a failed marriage is amplified by the bird ballet. Moved to tears, she surrenders to the reality of this foreign place as her abode: “I am at the same time invader, and I am at home”.

Kuba Dorabialski’s Crying is a ficto-documentary meditation on homesickness experienced on colonised land. A complex and melancholy proposition, Crying speaks to home as a vestige of memory lost to social and cultural displacement, human migration patterns poetically distilled in bird colonies. There is a rich tradition of contemporary artists (think Agnes Denes) who have considered migrating birds as a metaphor for human diaspora and colonisation. Starlings, for instance, are a ‘global’ bird species introduced to many parts of the world, including Australia in the mid-1880s. Some descriptions online refer to starlings as ‘introduced’; others term them ‘invasive’. So-called Australia has used similar words to either white-wash or truth-tell its own history of colonisation.

Crying loosely resembles fragments of Dorabialski’s own family migration narrative, but unfolds like a hypnotic waking dream, building to a slow and rejuvenating release of tears. The Australian landscape is aestheticised though a cinematic visual language that paints it as simultaneously foreign and familiar – a cradle for homesickness whichever way you look at it. The nostalgia generated by homesickness autocorrects memories of the past as inherently idealistic and trauma free. The problem with nostalgia is that it wallows in yesterday only to confirm the values of a rose-tinted past. A kind of mnemonic propaganda of selfhood standing still. Where we scratch away in the dirt to unearth an idea of home that was never there from the start.