2022–
handmade paper and ink, scavenged wood and metal, wire, glue
A series of 20 paper sculptures, three of which have been completed and exhibited so far. The project began within Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme and was exhibited as part of ‘Adero’, the final group show within the former sewing factory Lelija, in Vilnius.
atminties atmintis (Eng. a memory of a memory) is a continuation of Speak Lietuviškai. The memories of each of the 20 performance days are endowed with a body. In this process, the sculpture becomes both a document of the performance and a response to it, hailing future responses in an iterative rabbit hole that blurs the (perceived) boundary of liveness between performance and document.
Through recollection rituals, I evoked my memories using the photographs, reflections and poems created during the 2021 performance. I then filtered the essence of those memories through movement, composition and automatic writing through which the presented, physical forms emerged.
The sculptures also envelop the memories of non-human objects, by incorporating materials found in the former sewing factory, Lelija, where we had our studio spaces. I made the paper for the sculptures using discarded factory documents dating back decades and rain water.
Thinking of these sculptures as chapters of a book that have been lifted and extended beyond the flatness of the page and embracing visual poetry’s notion of text having primarily an aesthetic function, I think of these episodes less like scuptures and more as three-dimensional texts.