Empty
Stages. Voices of Women. A Double Individual.
The videos capture once-popular, now abandoned and decrepit
public spaces in Lithuania (the video series
"Stages": "Rehearsal" (2002),
"Spinsters" (2003),
"Leisure" (2003),
"Order" (2004),
"Shutdown" (2004),
"Fall" (2005),
"Fire" (2005)).
These are various stages (opera and ballet theatre,
cultural house, shooting range, restaurant, cinema hall
and summer arena) resounding with voices of women living
at the present time, which stir static images and fill
them with life.
Giving sense to your identity through the spoken or sung
word in a certain context can create tension, as the woman
is only a social construct in society, conditioned and
limited by various historical, political, economic or
cultural circumstances, which come to the fore in different
ways in my videos.
New times are coming, bringing with it a new order, but the
memories of decades passed live on. What we encounter in
these empty stages is not really a conflict between an
individual and her environment, but rather a double
individual within whom two sides are fighting: an
individual experiencing a period of adaptation to the
Western system of values, which continues after eighteen
years of the restoration of independence in Lithuania
(1990), and an individual still carrying the burden of
Soviet world outlook expressed in the form of a certain
nostalgia. This kind of being double is a symptom of the
ongoing shift of local and inflexible Soviet mentality in
the presence of the Western neo-liberal models of thinking
and self-expression, which are going to gain firmer ground
in Lithuania. In the future this confrontation is going to
decrease, but the perpetuation of the present conflict is
important in a historical respect. The conflicting
character of a double individual in my videos returns us to
the dramatics and reflective characteristics of a classical
book or film.