atminties atmintis

2022 Rupert, Vilnius (part of 'Adero', curated by Tautvydas Urbelis)

site-specific installation / old factory documents recycled into new paper and pulp, ink made form oxidised scrap copper, scavenged wood and metal, wire, glue

The project began in 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 three of the 20 performance days are endowed with a body. In this process, the paper sculptures become 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.

These sculptures are chapters of a book that have been lifted and extended beyond the flatness of the page to fully embrace visual poetry’s notion of text having primarily an aesthetic function; therefore, these episodes are less like sculptures and more like three-dimensional texts.

Photos by Laurynas Skeisgiela and artist’s personal archive.