Three things happened at the same time. The pandemic locked the world down. AI irrupted into everyday life. And in the spring of 2021, I rode 1,600 kilometres alone through four countries — not as a project, not as a protest, but as a survival decision. The only way I could find space to breathe.

The journey was an internal one. Sleeping alone every night in dark forests, without the dog I would later bring, I had nothing but distance and silence to work with. I came back changed — not returned to where I had started, but somewhere else entirely. I decided to change my artistic life, and many aspects of my life in general. The Monas and Tent Visions series came from those nights in the forest. The Post-COVID Series is the internal record: what happened to the self when the interruption was total.

The technique mirrors the condition. An early AI portrait system, interrupted at arbitrary stages of its iterative process — the nested transformations stopped before they could resolve. The system collapses noise into symmetry, texture into flesh, ambiguity into a face — unless you stop it. I stopped it, 98 times, at different moments, following visual judgment alone. Each interrupted state was then translated back into hand-drawn ink — human gesture re-entering where the algorithm was forced to abort form.

In Leporinas, the same interrupted process is about what the machine erases: cultural identity, colonial convergence toward a Western ideal. Here it is about something else entirely: metamorphosis. The self that does not complete its transformation into what it was supposed to become, and finds itself instead in the unresolved middle. Not the original. Not the destination. Something that was made by the interruption itself.

Lockdown and AI irruption were not separate events — they arrived together, both forcing the same question: what remains when the familiar process cannot complete itself? The Post-COVID Series is one answer. 98 interrupted faces. 98 self-portraits of survival — the kind that doesn't return you to where you started.