This photograph is part of a larger photo series, "Almost Home," based on Franz Kafka's novella "The Metamorphosis," shot in... Read More
This photograph is part of a larger photo series, "Almost Home," based on Franz Kafka's novella "The Metamorphosis," shot in a real abandoned apartment on Bokštos Street in Vilnius Old Town. The series is part of my master's project at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, "Unsettling Interpretations Beyond the Theatre Stage."
It's a still life from the life of the Samsa family - a table after a meal, viewed from above, with an empty chair next to it. There's no family here: absence itself becomes the subject of the image. In this project, the interior isn't a backdrop, but an equal co-creator of each scene. A withered flower, a half-eaten can of sprats, a broken plate, a worn embroidered fabric - these objects carry as much story as the novella's characters, telling of life continuing in a space that has long since ceased to be inhabited.
Unsettlingness is the central state of this work. Not fear, which always has an object, but anxiety without an object - the experience of being surrounded by familiar things, and feeling like a stranger within them. I'm not illustrating Kafka; I'm creating conditions in which this state can be experienced. The apartment with its peeling walls and dirty windows wasn't a set, but a co-author. The shooting took place on location, without digital manipulation of the space.
