Matylda Niżegorodcew
Octopus’s Diary

Exhibition Details

What if...? Matylda Niżegorodcew is obsessed with this question. With the feeling that her existence could hide a thousand other lives, the consequences of different choices. We are at a constant crossroads, and every move leads to another reality. Possibilities seem endless. It is a typical feeling of post-adolescence which, perhaps now more than ever, can be extended to all ages as social media show us lives that are not our own, and trick us into believing we can understand them. Thinking about this too much makes us feel vertigo.

Niżegorodcew fully enters this spiral. She takes off her own clothes, stops sleeping in her bed, and slips into the lives of others for 48 hours. Julia, Anula, Kuba and Marsi are her collaborators in this experiment: she spends two days with each of them, getting close enough to remove all filters and experience the absurd, paradoxical experience of being somebody else. It is a physical test: it is not about following or observing them, but about eating the same things, sharing spaces, internalizing every inch of their routines. It is about being observed in turn, photographed while becoming them. “I acted as if I were air,” she writes: every life is the tentacle of an octopus, and to be able to truly follow them one must become transparent, disappear.

Octopus’s Diary is an open, unresolved archive of multiple and parallel lives, demonstrating the lightness and dedication needed to take a question seriously.