openstudio
lisbon, portugal
2024
openstudio is a studio-based project and event held in lisbon in august 2024, as a farewell gesture to the artist’s studio before leaving the place.
the work continues anna’s ongoing reflection on migration, fragility, and the temporality of home. having moved through several countries and rooms, she recreates and revisits these spaces both physically and digitally — turning them into layered environments where memory, routine, and displacement coexist. her roblox map gathers these chapters into a constellation, including her lisbon studio and a former home in tbilisi.
in her lisbon apartment, the artist invited visitors to enter the studio alone. a printed note welcomed them: “make yourself at home. you may touch things, sit at my desk, and explore the map of a virtual place where i search for home.” on the table lay small traces of life — buttons, documents, potatoes — while the studio itself remained changeable: temporary fixes, shifting light, small accidents and repairs. for ania, potatoes are a symbol of home carried through transitions. like her, they are migrants: uprooted, displaced, waiting without soil to anchor them. observing them day by day, she reads their quiet narratives of resilience and adaptation.
by combining the physical studio with its digital counterpart on the roblox map, ania blurs the line between the tangible and the imagined. the visitor can navigate both — the room they stand in and its simulated version — experiencing how a home might exist in two realities at once.
openstudio reflects on how the idea of “home” changes in motion: how objects, rooms, and even digital spaces can hold a person’s presence when everything else remains temporary — when you are waiting for documents, and a “home” can fit in your pocket. after the event, the artist dismantled the studio, staying faithful to her ongoing exploration of impermanence.