Places not to visit

Teodoras Malinauskas in 2022/09 made a personal photography exhibition "Places not to visit" in Vilnius. It is a look at the outskirts and the borders of the city. "I visit places not to be visited, I stop at what is usually bypassed and overlooked, I look at the things other than a must see. I wonder what's worth noting and what's not? What do we want to save and remember and what do we want to forget? Photography allows you to capture unstable, transitory states and at the same time reminds you of the inevitable end of the monumental.''- says the author.

The influence of Lithuanian photographers Remigijus Treigys and Vytautas Balčytis can be felt in the author's photographs. Josef Sudek and Remigijus Pačėsa also noted banal objects, which allowed Teodoras to more confidently marvel at the mundane, suppress insignificant details of the city or emphasize their graphic image and explore ordinary scenes. The aforementioned photographers share an aesthetic of boredom, which is characterized by meaningless and ineffective images of everyday life. Based on this aesthetic Teodoras looks for new angles - daringly looking down, through a crack in the fence or diving into the bushes. Enjoying slow photography, he returns to photograph at another time of the day or year.

Teodoras photographs the city from the back. If you step away from the epicenter and slow down your gaze, interesting things begin to open up: the unevenness of urban development, the inconsistencies of different narratives, the incompatibility of interests, the unexpected cuts of the urban fabric. There are no people in the photographs, but their traces are strongly felt - architectural dissonances tell about complex human relationships. In Teodoras' works, time is interwoven with speeding and moving, signs of events and nothingness, weariness and freshness, abundance and scarcity. Timeless city scapes created with analog techniques disrupt the viewer's perception of time, invite them to wonder about the present and fantasize about the future.

The perspective of a city observer-street artist is evident in Teodoras' work. During his studies, he built a round bench and a track in Žvērynas. The bench was built as an experiment, which made it possible to observe the reaction of park visitors and city guards to an extraneous object. Later, Teodoras noticed a visually collapsed trail, which became difficult to use due to the changed terrain. The artist arranged the track with a minor intervention, thus turning the paradox of the situation into an object of observation. Over the course of more than a decade, the works have become intertwined with the city and people - they wear out, disappear naturally, or are still being used.

For Teodoras, the philosophy of walking is inseparable from observing and capturing the city. "Life is walking. Man is made to walk, and all the big and small events of life unfold when we walk among other people. <...> First life, then spaces, then buildings - the reverse never works."Jan Gehl










Interview

in local web Foto Josvydas Elinskas