I Kiss You Today For Tomorrow

2025/2026
Photobook dummy
Prints on paper, aluminium dibond, and vinyl
By Jiyan Céline Schmidiger
Mentored by Salvatore Vitale, Dr. Wolfgang Brückle
Yumna Al-Arashi, Laia Abril,
Taiyo Onorato, Ann-Christin Bertrand

Exhibited at:
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences
and Arts Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art
«Werkschau»

24.04.2026 — 15.08.2026

Kornhausforum
«Poetics Of Deconstruction: I Kiss You Today For Tomorrow
and Our Gaze Is Not Yours To Claim»
Group exhibition featuring Nedia Boutouchent
Curated by Pearlie Frisch

16.05.2026 — 04.06.2026

BULB 6000
«UNPUBLISHED»

26.09.2026 — 29.11.2026

at Photometria International Photography Festival
Photometria Photobook Award 2026

I Kiss You Today For Tomorrow explores local culture and heritage through the lens of collective memory in Northern Kurdistan. Decades of forced assimilation have led to fragmented identities and erased histories. Drawing from experience across generations, the project blends personal testimonies and speculative elements, dissolving boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.

Moving back and forth in time, the project weaves together documentary images, staged scenes, and archival references. To the narrator, landscapes in Istanbul, Zurich, and Mesopotamia become spaces where stories and imagination intertwine. Fragments of memory pair with other testimonies and reflect broader cultural and political dynamics, asking how past experiences are carried, silenced, or transformed in diaspora. Identity is fluid—shaped by forced migration, intergenerational trauma, and hybrid belonging. Home becomes a state between memory and myth, between known realities and imagined possibilities.

Rooted in real events yet expanded through speculation, the project portrays political activism under oppression, showing how it permeates daily life. Through fictionalising testimonies and reenacting fragments of lived experience, the project moves intentionally between fiction and non-fiction—for protection and to hold the unspeakable. A textual layer introduces a dialogue between narrator and protagonist, where contemporary photography reflects on the act of uncovering history under conditions of silence.

Absence is central. Where records fall silent, speculation honours what could not be preserved. The work imagines the afterlife of a boy who died at six, exploring how people craft stories to make sense of death and loss. While fictionalised, this account is rooted in lived experience and symbolises many others—subtly commemorating lives silenced by oppressive conditions and genocide, and the grief that follows their loss.