The project is a photographic series and installation based on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", shot in a real, empty apartment on Bokšto Street, in the Old Town of Vilnius. My aim was to explore how theatrical language can work outside the theatre - in a living space, through photography, through the body and costume, without a stage and without an audience. The apartment had stood empty for years, and I did not treat it as a set. It became a co-author of the project.
The installation is built as a corridor of four double-sided canvases, each three metres high. Each canvas is, at the same time, a wall of the apartment and a page from an old family album. The photographs are not hung as exhibits in a gallery - they become part of the walls themselves, torn, stained, aged. The apartment on Bokšto Street was renovated soon after the shoot; that space no longer exists. So the installation is, in a way, an echo of it - a trace, the breathing of a room that is already gone. When the viewer walks through the corridor, they do not enter an exhibition hall, but someone's home. The viewer is not an observer. They become a witness. They enter a space that has already happened - and their presence makes it alive again.
The masks are a separate part of the work. There is one important point: in my project, everyone wears a mask except Gregor. This may seem strange - usually, in stories about transformation, the mask would be on him, on the one who changed. But I chose a different path: the real metamorphosis does not happen to Gregor. It happens to those who surround him. The mask removes the psychological transparency of the family: the viewer sees who they are, but does not immediately understand why they are this way. This gap, between recognition and confusion, is where anxiety begins.
I did not want to retell Kafka. I wanted to create the contour of his story, so that the viewer feels what Gregor feels, without reading a single line. I give no explanation and no ending - only space for reflection. Maybe someone will leave and want to read "The Metamorphosis" again. Maybe they will not think of Kafka at all, but of something of their own: a home that stopped feeling like home. That is the quiet question the work leaves behind - and everyone answers it alone.
