Travel North is a photographic series that began in 2017, using a special edition of expired color film produced in the USSR to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Manufactured in 1969, the film carries the chemical imprint of another era—its shifting tones and accumulated imperfections mirroring the instability and tension inherent in historical memory. Over the course of the project, I worked with a variety of both black-and-white and color films—Tasma, Svema Foto, Orwo, and eventually Kodak—moving gradually from 1969 toward the present.

Born after the collapse of the USSR and growing up in Lithuania in the late 1990s and early 2000s, amid the lingering remnants and uncertainties of the past, I was drawn to these expired films as a way of reaching toward an experience accessible only through ancestry. I treated the light-sensitive emulsion as a vessel of memory, exposing it to a world it was never meant to see.

The series is also grounded in a reflection on the ideas of Lithuanian geographer Kazys Pakštas, who in the 1930s proposed creating an overseas Lithuanian colony to safeguard the nation from looming threats from both West and East. His vision prompts a question that shadows the work: What might have unfolded had the 1939 Soviet occupation never occurred, sparing Lithuania more than five decades of political repression, forced exile, and cultural stagnation?

In Travel North, the camera turns toward the Vilnius train station—a liminal space of departure and arrival, exile and return. By facing north, the lens symbolically engages with Pakštas’s speculative geography while contemplating the psychological and physical displacements that shape both past and present. The series becomes an exploration of imagined futures, lost utopias, and a search for connection with what can never be fully experienced.