Mimicry. Panopticon Effect is an ongoing visual and theoretical project that explores how human presence — and its visual echoes — adapt, disappear, and resist under authoritarian pressure. Rooted in my personal experience of exile after the peaceful mass protests in Belarus in 2020, the work traces a slow return — not across borders, but through photographic gestures shaped by fear, memory, and refusal. 

I began the series with undeveloped analog film, shot on the ordinary streets of Minsk (Belarus). After leaving my homeland in 2023, the film was carried across the border by others. In exile, I layered these same frames with self-portraits made in the Lithuanian forest — the only space where I felt safe. There, mimicry emerged not as a concept, but as instinct. Among trees, I aligned with a landscape that did not demand identity, only presence. 

In Belarus, a regime that mimics democratic forms while suppressing dissent has transformed both public and private life into a space of control. Following the protests — which were met with mass arrests, torture, and algorithmic surveillance — visibility itself became criminalized. Flags, clothing colors, even “likes” on social media could result in arrest. Facial recognition systems, data tracing created a full-spectrum panopticon. 

Within this context, mimicry becomes a necessary strategy: a way to blend in, to not be noticed — but also a way to speak in indirect forms. Mimicry as a double articulation: it simultaneously imitates and threatens the dominant power. In Belarus, mimicry is practiced by both the people and the regime — one to survive, the other to disguise repression as governance. 

This project also affirms Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” — the right not to be fully visible or fully understood. Under regimes where transparency is used as a weapon, opacity becomes a form of self-protection. These images embrace blur, double exposure, and visual fragmentation not as flaws but as ethical refusals — they resist the demand to be legible, explained, or consumed.

Influenced by thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak — who writes on depression and authoritarian affect — I position photography not as documentation, but as a site of negotiation: between image and body, past and rupture, power and silence. 

This is not a narrative of return, but of resonance. These images do not reclaim clarity. They murmur, flicker, hide. They ask: 

How do we inhabit our bodies when they are constantly read, scanned, and interpreted by others?

What does it mean to be present without being legible? 

How can memory be carried without collapsing under its own weight?

What kind of remembering resists both erasure and fixation?

How can resistance take form without submitting to the logic of surveillance?