Vittorio Santoro
Expire (Josef K’s Relation Diagram to 17 of the Characters in F. Kafka’s 'The Trial'), 2019

Arrested to his surprise without further explanation one morning, [Josef K., the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial] runs the gauntlet of various authorities. Expire defines his seventeen most momentous encounters. (…) The selection of characters in the novel represent certain aspects of the personal and social realm, such as work, the law, religion, or the emotions. A formal rigor and materials restrained in color constitute equivalents of Kafka’s sober narrative style and his insistence on a minimum of props. (…) Expire is reminiscent of a laboratory situation that negotiates the struggle between autonomy and heteronomy and thus, ultimately, the role of the individual in society.

Text by the artist.