60 Days with Myself is a durational self-portrait series developed as part of Petrauskas’s research into idleness as a form of resistance. Inspired by Bernardo Soares’s reflection that nature denied humans the ability to look into their own eyes, the work emerges from a prolonged period of chosen isolation in which such self-confrontation becomes inevitable.
For sixty days, Petrauskas withdrew from academic and domestic labour, from entertainment, listening, and digital communication. Each day, she photographed herself in the same domestic spaces, the room, the kitchen, the backyard, where repetition slowly replaced variation. Like Xavier de Maistre’s Journey Around My Room, the project unfolds as a return to the same, where the unchanging environment becomes a flat surface for the perception of interior movement. In the absence of external noise, the internal crowd grows louder.
Through this stripping away of activity and distraction, 60 Days with Myself stages the body as a floating figure within monotony, its contours blurred, like Malevich’s White on White. In the quiet, the work invites the viewer to look inward, to face the discomfort of one’s own reflection, and to consider idleness not only as non-productivity but as a radical, even unsettling, form of presence.
Exhibited at Avesso (2020) and FBAUP Museum, Porto (2021).
Isadora Petrauskas 