The photography exhibition “Nothing to Declare” by artist and director Motiejus Mainelis was presented at the 8 Akys ir Ausys Gallery (38 Algirdo St., Vilnius).

Through this project, the artist rethinks reality as a multilayered system in which visible and invisible processes constantly overlap. Using photography and microbiological documentation, he explores the boundary between an event and its residue, between document and fiction, between everyday urban experience and its invisible biological structures.

The photographs capture urban situations in which the action has already ended, while human presence is sensed only through objects, traces, and compositions formed within space. Documentary photography here loses its status of neutrality and becomes a field of imagined scenarios, where fact, speculation, and fiction intertwine.

Mainelis is interested not in the event itself, but in what remains after it disappears from the visible field. Abandoned objects and accidental compositions made up of artefacts found in public spaces acquire the status of evidence.

This logic is extended on a microscopic level. Bacteria collected from the surfaces of urban and tourist sites in Paris are documented under a microscope, revealing an invisible yet active dimension of life — one that exposes the scale of human traces and their inscription into the material and biological structures of the environment.

The city here is understood not as a space controlled by humans, but as a multispecies system in which microorganisms, surfaces, objects, and social practices form an interconnected network. Nothing to Declaredecentralizes the human position and invites us to view the everyday environment as a field of coexistence, where meaning is created not only by human actions, but also by invisible biological processes.

Curator – Milda Dainovskytė.
Graphic design – Akvilė Paukštytė.

Special thanks to: Akvilė Paukšytė, Austė Marcinkevičienė, Kristijonas Marcinkevičius, Alvydas Lukys, Vadim Šamkov, Jokūbas Maldeikis, Vaiva Mainelytė, Dovilė Žebrauskė, Gintas Kavoliūnas, Alvydas Lukys, Laurynas Skeisgiela, Simon Gimelstein, Nicolas Dray, VDA, ENSAD Paris and Institut Pasteur.