Uzory Festival, Neon Gallery, Belgrade, June 1, 2024
What Shaped Me is a participatory installation in which the act of collective engagement becomes the central artistic gesture. The work does not exist as a finished object prior to audience involvement; its form, structure, and meaning emerge exclusively through the actions of participants. In this way, the installation deliberately moves away from the idea of a fixed authorial statement and instead proposes art as a temporary social field, activated within a specific place and moment.
At the core of the installation is a large-scale panel titled What Shaped Me. Its surface features a series of textual markers referring to fundamental human experiences and life conditions: home, relocations, personal losses, fears, people, choice, acceptance, experience, support, loneliness, path, mistakes, and love. These elements are presented without hierarchy or prescribed order. Participants are invited to connect them with threads, creating their own pattern of relationships — a subjective map of the forces that have shaped their lives. Each connection functions as an act of interpretation and self-reflection, performed publicly within the shared space of the festival.
While the visual language of the installation recalls networks, maps, or schematic systems, its logic is not analytical. Rather than establishing causal relationships or offering a universal model of identity, the work visualises lived experience as something fluid and unstable. There is no correct route through the structure, no instruction to follow; each participant constructs a personal trajectory grounded in individual biography and intuition.
The collective dimension of the work is essential. Although each participant creates an individual pattern, all threads remain visible and intersect with the choices of others. Over time, the surface becomes a dense visual field in which personal trajectories overlap and merge. The installation does not document individual stories in isolation but captures the condition of encounter — a convergence of people, experiences, and life histories temporarily coexisting within the same space. The resulting image cannot be reduced to a sum of biographies; it exists as a collective trace of shared presence.
The context of the Uzory Festival is crucial to the interpretation of the work. Uzory is an artist-led festival dedicated to themes of self-searching, creative freedom, and the rethinking of home. Held on June 1, 2024, at Neon Gallery in Belgrade, the festival brought together artists and audiences with lived experiences of migration, displacement, and life between cultures. Within this framework, What Shaped Me can be read as a collective portrait of a generation for whom instability and the constant reassembly of identity have become defining conditions.
Notably, the installation does not articulate migration as an explicit political statement. Instead, it addresses its internal, existential consequences. Home is no longer a geographical location but a constellation of meanings and relationships; relocation exists alongside acceptance, loss alongside support, and loneliness alongside the presence of others. Identity is thus understood not as a stable entity but as a shifting pattern assembled from fragmented and sometimes contradictory experiences.
The material language of the work is intentionally restrained. Threads emphasise the fragility and temporality of the connections that shape a human life. They are not permanently fixed and may sag, intersect, or overlap, visually reflecting the instability and multiplicity of interpretation. The absence of colour symbolism reinforces the universality of the gesture, directing attention away from aesthetics and toward the act of connection itself. In this sense, the installation engages with traditions of relational aesthetics, in which the artwork exists primarily through human interaction rather than as an autonomous object.
Equally important is the artist’s withdrawal from control over the final form. The artist establishes the framework and conditions for interaction but does not determine the outcome. The final configuration is always unique and irreproducible, shaped by a specific group of participants and a specific moment in time. Once the festival concludes, the installation ceases to exist in its original form, underscoring its temporal nature and its dependence on the community that formed it.
What Shaped Me can therefore be understood as an archive of a fleeting collective — a visual trace of an encounter between individuals connected by shared conditions of uncertainty and search. The work offers no definitive answers and resists universal conclusions. Instead, it creates space for acknowledging the multiplicity of paths, ruptures, and intersections that constitute contemporary biography. Rather than narrating the past as a completed story, the installation documents an ongoing process of identity formation — one that continues beyond the exhibition space and remains fundamentally open.
About the Artist
The artist of the installation is
Vika Lisitsyna, a photographer and multidisciplinary artist whose practice operates at the intersection of visual art, participatory methodologies, and the exploration of identity. Her work engages with questions of self-formation, migration, the loss of stable reference points, and the redefinition of home, approaching identity as an ongoing process rather than a fixed condition.
Lisitsyna’s practice places particular emphasis on collective action and audience participation, positioning the viewer as a co-author of the work. Her projects are often structured as open systems that are activated through individual choice, lived experience, and interaction. By deliberately relinquishing control over the final visual outcome, the artist shifts attention from the art object to the process and conditions through which it emerges.
Working with restrained material means, Lisitsyna uses simple, accessible elements as tools for articulating complex personal and collective states. Within this framework, What Shaped Me continues her investigation into temporary communities and visual archives of encounter, in which individual biographies become legible through their connections to others.
