Fitting in

Fitting In is a site-specific photographic project created during the 2016 Saitama Triennale in Japan, in collaboration with my partner Valery Bolotin. For two weeks we lived and worked inside a traditional six-tatami room. Every few days we removed one tatami mat and constructed a temporary environment in its place: a Pond, a Cabbage Field, and a Bamboo Forest. Each set existed only briefly before being dismantled, leaving behind a single selected photograph.

The work explores temporary belonging, adaptation, and the fragile construction of “home” in unfamiliar contexts. The room becomes both a living space and a site of transformation - where natural landscapes are imagined, assembled, photographed, and erased. The process foregrounds collaboration, observation, improvisation, and the tension between the everyday and the fictional.
One tatami is enough to contain a world, but it takes two to see it.