Photo reportage from the exhibition ‘Eye Dust: An Adaptation of a Novel to Come’ by Goda Palekaitė at Beursschouwburg, Brussels

As a preamble to writing a novel, she uses the exhibition space to rehearse a storytelling practice based on intimate connections with history. Blending speculative fiction and subjective realities into minor histories, the exhibition acts as a premonition of that which has yet to be written.

A ghostly soundscape immerses us into an otherworldly atmosphere. Wind, rain, the singing of monks at Count Dracula’s resting ground, a Lithuanian lullaby, creaky sounds and gradient light radiate through the ceiling that reproduces Venetian Renaissance patterns. Tracing back her characters’ footsteps through field research, the artist deploys a scenography that molds the exhibition space into an anachronistic time bubble, where futuristic sci-fi aesthetics take a trip down memory lane.

The scene takes place in a bedroom. We are greeted by two women whose poetry and struggles blend into the eerie folds of a canopy. The words of Grisélidis Réal mingle with Veronica Franco’s verses in a joint meditation on art and labor in “the works of love”.

Here, laying on a silver-coated bed, one may fall into slumber to an ensemble of clashing yet complementary voices. The video-collage I Write While Disappearing (2021) combines television footage of women talking about their writing. Typed inserts of the artist’s own doubts and confessions to the soundtrack of composer Adomas Palekas pull us into the aesthetics of first generation video games. With the size of a book and the shape of a game, the film pulls the threads of an open-ended conversation at the confluence of art, writing, womanhood and activism.

One of these threads culminates in sleep. “When I don’t write I sleep, and while I sleep I dream, which means that I write”, says Hélène Cixous. Echoing this sense of the dream world as a space for knowledge and imagination to (re)surface, we could summon Toni Cade Bambara, another writer who recognized the affinity between writing and dreaming. Like writing, “[d]reams confront you, push you up against the games you play, the self-deceptions, the false knowings and false awakenings too.” Dreams are unveiling. They are haunted in ways that reality cannot contain, so it is in writing that the ghosts spill out into (collective) memory.

At the cusp of embodied testimony and supernatural contact, Biographic Disobedience (2020) furthers the reflection on unbounded expressions of women navigating a male-dominated environment. Filmed in what used to be a Dominican church (Kunsthal Gent), performer Caterina Mora unloads the erotic weight of the mystical encounters accounted by “women who lived under Christian patriarchy yet practiced forms of disobedience.” “You were I, and I was you” – Caterina’s voice expands the boundaries of the self, resounding through the words of saints such as Theresa de Avila and Hildegard von Bingen. As the image blurs and the voice starts to shiver, the body begins to palpitate toward a place beyond words, beyond the suffocating authorities policing desire.

Women have long been demonized by patriarchal powers, with the Church playing a prominent role. Indeed, Christian traditions contributed to the idea of “nature” as a correlate to the unpredictable, unreasonable and even monstrous character of the “feminine”. Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, a writer and cartoonist offering new readings of the horror genre through a queer feminist lens, describes how the creation of monsters translates patriarchy’s attempt to keep a looming threat under control: “A monster is a supposed-to-be-subjugated body that has become threatening and voracious – a woman who is, in the most basic sense, out of (men’s) control.”Horror stories have given many faces to the monstrous feminine, from the possessed and the witch to the shapeshifter and the temptress. Developed through a joint research project with Adrijana Gvozdenović, Anthropomorphic Trouble (2021) sets out to revisit some horror phantasms pertaining to othered-beings-turned-monsters.

Starring a non-human cast, the film navigates the animal world as a territory of the unknown, of the monstrous. As such, it challenges the ways in which human cultures have projected their worlds, norms and fears onto their surroundings. From the Jurassic Coast of Dorset (UK) to the Mammoth Park in Kostolac (Serbia), passing through natural history museums and underwater footage found on Youtube, the film mobilizes real and imagined creatures to a suspenseful soundtrack edited by Teresa Cos. Can we engage with animals’ past and future lives without foreclosing them into the categories of the known?

Each in their own way, the characters cited in EYE DUST participate in a legacy of dissidence and refusal. From their more or less privileged positions, they have left more, or less visible; more, or less widely remembered traces of their resistance to hegemonic power structures. The artist metabolizes such “leftovers of history” by thinking with, and through, diachronic imaginaries.

From a collection of singular stories finding surprising resonances with each other, Goda carves out space for subjectivity, intuition and imagination to shape a multiplicity of possible plots for the future. And we are brought back to a timeless loop: Who is remembered? Who gets to leave a trace? How to shape common, future mythologies?

– Sofia Dati, visual and audiovisual arts programmer at Beursschouwburg