photographic series "Almost home"

This photograph is part of Almost Home, a large-scale photographic series based on Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, shot in a real abandoned apartment on Bokšto Street in the Old Town of Vilnius. The series is part of my master's project at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, "Unsettling Interpretations Beyond the Theatrical Stage."

The image is a portrait of Grete Samsa, Gregor's sister, masked and seated frontally. By the end of the novella her life takes a turn for the better - and her mask wears an ironic smile, the kind Kafka describes with an almost unbearable neutrality. In my project, everyone wears a mask except Gregor: the real metamorphosis does not happen to him, but to those who surround him. The grotesque masks, made of plaster-soaked gauze, reveal what the characters would never say aloud.

Anxiety is the central state of this work. Not fear, which always has an object, but anxiety without one - the experience of being surrounded by familiar things and feeling like a stranger inside them. I do not illustrate Kafka; I create the conditions in which this state can be felt. The apartment, with its peeling walls and dirty windows, was not a set but a co-author. Shot on location, without digital alteration of the space.