“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be a desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
— Vladimir Nabokov.
Toska is the evidence of my attempts to recreate a feeling in a single editorial of a childhood spent looking up at the towering figures of the post-Soviet Lithuania. Young, careless and rough around the edges was the typical adolescent, free to do as he may yet unsure of his identity, now unrestricted by the belt of the Russian socialist regime. Or, as a matter of fact, exactly this being their chosen identity.
Nostalgia, tinged with melancholy, was everywhere; in the textures of food, the colours of gopnik’s attire, the coolness of the concrete slab boroughs and the overcast face of the mischievous hooligan on the street.
All clothes were thrifted, the boys scouted, edibles cooked and curated based on distant undying memories, and architectural structures located around Liverpool (and a couple in Klaipėda) all in pursuit to paint the mood of almost fifty years of USSR in our blood.
Each exploration leaves us with questions to ponder:
Who are we once the oppressor has left? Can we find our way through the ennui and melt ourselves away from the frozen grip of the past?
Somewhere between altitude delirium and more rice than stars in the sky, I found myself drawn again to the textures of identity both literal and metaphorical.
This series isn’t about nostalgia, but continuity — the dialogue between the sacred and the practical, the woven and the worn. Traditional Himalayan garments, once lived in and worked in, now rest in dark wardrobes, their stories waiting to be heard again.
By inviting locals to step back into their ancestral garbs with new intention, I witnessed not preservation, but reawakening — as if the fabric itself sighed, “Ahh, yes, I remember who I am.”
Because perhaps our task isn’t to digitise the present, but to dignify the past.
Not as replicas, but as continuations.
Because maybe, the last thread is also the first.
