Yuliia Popika

The work explores the moment after a person has disappeared, when the space still retains their form. Objects in the composition are presented not as utilitarian items, but as shells of experience. They preserve memory of contact, weight, movement, and time.

Shoes, stripped of the body, deform and seem to melt, transforming into traces of action rather than functional objects. In this sense, the work is about the object revealing itself not as a thing, but as a way of being in the world. When the user disappears, the object loses its everyday “invisibility” and becomes visible in its own materiality and fragility. Here, the shoes no longer serve — they exist.

The deformation of forms also relates to the phenomenology of the body, in which the body is not merely a physical object but a mode of experiencing space. In the work, the body is absent, but its former presence is read through the slipping surface — the space remembers the gesture even without the carrier.

The theme of absence as a particular form of presence resonates with the concept of the trace, in which every mark contains the absent, and meaning emerges precisely from what has disappeared. The melted shape of the shoes becomes such a trace — a material sign of an event that cannot be seen, but can be felt.

Thus, the work does not depict a person but creates a field of their post-existence. The viewer encounters not the character, but their temporal shadow — a space that has not yet forgotten them.