Our skin, turned to the world, feels the world touching and touches it back. Directly or metaphorically. Every incident, surprise, touch makes the skin to sense, to react. Its surface becomes a skinscape that identifies who we are in relation to the Other, to the world. Inscribed with words, numbers, symbols, our skins shape our inner subjectivity into the object. Losing ourselves between words of others – hate words or love words – making us into the objects of desires – we are still open to the world through our skin. Even if it is uncomfortable. Even if we are in danger. Our skin contains stories, histories, words. Like the pages of a book, it is a surface for language, for poetry. From when (or maybe even earlier) 19-20 century doctor and bibliophile Ludovic Bouland thought that he was in a position to take an anonymous woman’s skin and turn it into covers for books and later to write medical advice on how to treat women’s illnesses. To the fictional stories, like Peter Greenaway’s 1996 movie The Pillow Book, where the publisher turned his dead lover’s body into the book pages so he could later spread them and roll into them. Our skin touches the world and like the pages of a book it becomes filled with words and stories.
Eglė Ambrasaitė’s artwork ‘Words Are Not Sparrows’ moving from physical to virtual space, becomes something like an exercise in refusing to think about the world in a dualistic manner while diving into relations of interdependence and complexity of matters. It is an exercise of trying to get yourself back. Effort in connecting what was separated and taking back what was taken away by Other’s words. Here materiality and dematerialization interweave, object and subject, air, water, fire, earth, mind, body, soul. You and the Other.
Eglė Ambrasaitė can be located in a spot reserved for interdisciplinary art: she is both an artist, a curator, and a scholar. Her interdisciplinary studies (Bachelor in Film, Video and Interactive Arts, Masters in Political Sciences and her ongoing PhD research in Gender Studies) have transformed her artistic work into a challenging contemporary and critical medium that crystallizes in the language of both visual arts (video/sculpture/installation), various forms of written materials and her curatorial practises for Aikas Žado Laboratory’s (Žeimiai Manor House) programmes. At the moment, her main artistic and curatorial practises circulate around the thematics of love, tender, toxicity and bodies/embodiments. Her theoretic interests encapsulate gender, biopolitics, late socialism and post-socialism, affect theories and dark ecology.
To see ‘Words Are Not Sparrows’ → http://hardtocare.net/zodis-ne-zvirblis-by-egle/
This project is part of the VMU art gallery 101 curatorial program dedicated to research alternative practices of love and care. → www.hardtocare.net
hardtocare design: Studio Cryo
Web programming: Tomas Martinkus
‘Words Are Not Sparrows’ typography: Gailė Pranckūnaitė
‘Words Are Not Sparrows’ 3D modelling: Dominykas Daunys
‘Words Are Not Sparrows’ sound design: Namik Emre Abus
Partly funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture