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.
2021 trolleybuses in Kaunas funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture
the city is what we remember of it — our memories are the contextual foundations on which kaunas exists. there are so many memories that i missed as i was growing up in the uk. there is a distance and this distance makes me feel alienated. i feel like i am home. i don’t always feel that others think the same. to me, home is inside people. how can i then be home if no one remembers me? if i can’t remember myself?
Speak Lietuviškai is the sibling performance of Kalbėk English, as both these works explore my transnational identity as a person who grew up between Lithuania and England.
Every day for 20 consecutive days, I rode on Kaunas’ trolleybuses until I had been on all routes twice each (10 x 2), connecting with other travellers through language, memories, reflections, photographs and other forms of immaterial touch.
I chose the setting of the trolleybus as when I was a child in Kaunas, I’d often get on the trolleybus to school but instead of getting off, I would stay there for the whole day, riding in circles and reading. By returning to this space, I wanted to activate my context-dependent memory and the language within it.
I made a poem each day as an offering to the collective memories of Kaunas’ residents. These poems were written on paper made from the water of the confluence of Neris and Nemunas rivers and buried across Kaunas.
Through this performance ritual, I bound myself to the collective memories of the people of Kaunas and began to (re)home myself within them.
2018 The Others, London 2022 POST gallery, Kaunas Picture Gallery 2022 Kėdainiai Bus Station, as part of FORMOS’22
SCORE
I begin with 5 blank pages and 5 ink cartridges that puncture the bottom of the container of water suspended above the writing altar.
i. I take the first ink cartridge and water begins falling on the page.
ii. I write continuously until the cartridge is empty.
iii. repeat until all the cartridges are empty and all the pages are full.
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Photo Akvilė Matulaitytė
Photo Akvilė Matulaitytė
Photo Akvilė Matulaitytė
Photo Holly Revell
Photo Holly Revell
Photo Akvilė Matulaitytė
the writer cleanses is a 5-hour durational performance that centres the action of cleansing through stream-of-consciousness writing as a way to confront personal trauma and disable the dimension of shame by making private domains public.
Inside the blur of the disappearing text, I invite audiences to ‘read’ the text I’m producing through the physical process of writing and linger with me at the border of my inside, swimming between the words and water on the page.
1 KAUNAS (1)
3 DEVON
LONDON (1)
LONDON (1)
LONDON (1)
LONDON (1)
The pages left after the performance transcend the form of a text and capture the time I spent with each page. ‘Reading’ these pages gives direct access to the thoughtspace of writing them, reducing the distance between idea and expression to more accurately reflect the underlying intent and emotions.
Language always has the potential to be corrupted and altered due to words’ incomplete performance of meaning and our individual understandings and associations. This way of writing attempts to circumvent these misalignments to seek a more precise connection between writer and reader.
2018 Embassy Theatre, London 2019 Camden People’s Theatre, London
rain begins to fall on a desert. a sheet of ice cracks like thunder, severed, falling into the ocean. bubbles head to the surface, dancing before imploding. a wave beats like a hammer against the side of a cliff.
through personal exploration and movement, w e t seeks to celebrate water; as a material, body, force of nature. embodying the cultural, political, mythological and personal meanings of water, the performance combines devised movement with my sound design, based on found and generated sounds of water.
this performance is a collaboration with Audree Barvé, Byuka Krow, Céleste Combes, Kalina Petrova, and Rachel Elizabeth Coleman.
2019 IKLECTIK Art Lab, London
Kalbėk English deconstructs the relationship between language and nationalism by utilising my personal history of emigrating to England from Lithuania at age 10, and then experiencing the attrition—disappearance and replacement—of my Lithuanian language by English.
Within both cultural contexts, language, as well as the proficiency and execution (i.e. accent) of that language is a key identifier of national identity. The performance took place a few years after Brexit referendum, with incidents of immigrants in the UK being harassed and told to speak English increasingly reported in media.
Combining research on second language acquisition, transnational identity formation and models of nationalism, I charted these interwoven transformations across 6 stages.
1: I INHERIT THE PRIDE AND FEAR OF HISTORY.
2: I FADE SILENTLY IN A FOREIGN LAND.
3: I RECOGNISE MYSELF IN DIFFERENCE.
4: I PERFORM LEAVING THE OTHERS.
5: I TRY TO HOLD ON TO BOTH.
6: I LET GO.
The text of the performance consists of 6 utterances, one for each stage. Using the cognitive model of speech formation, I verbalised the journey from idea to utterance, focusing on the choices that go into constructing these sentences as the main mode of meaning production, with the utterance itself being purely performative.
I performed the text on top of live looping of speech rhythms in Lithuanian and English, as I repeated the action of moving towards and away from a suitcase.
2018 Rich Mix, London
SCORE
I begin dressed all in white, with a tub full of red wine, a white towel to stand on and a sponge
i. take all-white clothes off. ii. bathe in red wine iii. put all-white clothes back on, allowing them to stain the fabric
In the Waters of River Möbius delves into the theme of addiction. Envisioning the state of dependence as an invisible river in the shape of a Möbius strip, a hyperobject that flows around us constantly, luring bodies for a sip to trap them in its endlessly circulating current.
This is what the addiction I witness around me and within me feels like. Something ever-present and easy to dip your toes into, but almost impossible to get out of once you get caught. i wanted to connect this vision with the action of staining as a mark of shame, in other words, airing my ‘dirty laundry’ in public.
By externalising and giving shape to the state of dependance, I wanted to move away from thinking of addiction as a personal shortcoming, but as a socially constructed set of circumstances that permeates us all.
