Octopus’s Diary
In Octopus’s Diary Matylda Niżegorodcew attempts to respond to recurring questions that have tormented her existence: “What if I hadn’t given up my passions, dreams or ambitions? What if I had made different choices, lived somewhere else or been a different gender?”
To give shape to these answers, the artist looks for people in which she finds the qualities she wants or feels she is lacking; people with characteristics that she dreams of and which seem to make their lives fuller and happier. For forty-eight hours the artist borrows a piece of their lives and identities, measuring herself up against these models and incorporating them into her own personal story by bringing them into her everyday life. She wears their clothes, sleeps in their beds, sneaks into their existence to see what it is like to live their lives. She is able to get close enough to these lives to go beyond any filters and experience the absurd paradox of being someone else.
Every step along this process of knowledge, exchange and identification is documented and sometimes it is the subjects themselves who step into the shoes of the photographer, so that the experiment distorts perspective and is even filtered through the eyes of the portrait’s intended subject.
