In Kanuti Gildi SAAL residency I will begin developing a new body of work as an inflation and deflation of hyper-romantic fantasy: a reconstruction of a fictional room that operates as both a physical installation and space for projection. I work with the autofiction genre in forms of installation-performance and expanded (naïvist) painting, allowing the space to function as an unstable container for desire.

I approach the residency as a playground for feminine dreamscape building – exploring the “obsessive space” of a generic guys room is a container for developing characters deriving from the lyrical-self in trap music and cloud rap – I use its language as an entry point into emotional dysfunction. I am drawn to the theatricality of anti-hero identities that circulate within a narrow emotional register — where detachment, vulnerability discomfort, and avoidance reveals a larger network of precocity. 

I am drawn to the scapegoat function these figures might hold —the way they leak feelings that are widely resonated, a societal condition that is “wounded,” yet remains deeply ignorant, egocentric, Western-centric, and misogynistic. These trap lyrical-self fantasies are often underlined by a kind of hidden precarity, where wealth and sexuality are performed through an underlying instability—where success appears temporary, fragile, or unreal, and where coolness operates as a shield for emotional incapacity.

I am interested in exploring how such chosen performative selves are adopted in everyday life, particularly in relation to poverty and socio-economic complexity within a post-Soviet regional context—as coping mechanisms shaped by gendered and economically conditioned upbringings, and how they inform modes of romantic relating.

Over the course of the residency, I will build a scenographic prototype inspired by airbrush painting techniques and naïvist compositional strategies, while developing trap lyrical-self character buildup. This continues my artistic research into autofiction and the unfolding of installation-performance as a form –  stretching on a concept of placemaking as “soft resistance’’ tool.