Luni

Text on practice draft

At this point of my creative life, my practice is mostly influenced by the poetic mode of documentary filmmaking. I do believe it is rooted inside of me – poetic way of documentary film making was an important creative tool in Lithuania during the time of the Soviet occupation – it was a way for Lithuanian artists to secretly express their thoughts and feelings without openly disobeying the restrictions of the totalitarian regime. Poetic documentary is this hybrid genre that connects classic, experimental and essayistic styles of documentary film making.

Themes for my most recent work mostly comes from my personal worries and experiences. For me, working on personal topics is a way of learning about the world and about myself. It is in a way therapeutic and liberating. Therefore, poetic mode documentary way of filmmaking is a very suitable medium because it allows the personal experiences and emotions to unfold by using creative techniques, which are supposed to affect the viewers to become a part and to experience and/or feel that part of the makers life.

That being said, my most recent work – I Think They Are Buildings – began from this big, perhaps even an abstract word - solitude. To me solitude is like an metamorphosis of loneliness that is often shared between the people who have experienced emigration, in one way or another. While trying to unfold this topic to a more personal level I tried to relive the time when I felt the loneliest found relief . I took the same, now well-known, routes around Rotterdam that were unfamiliar 6 years ago. And it struck me – I always found comfort in buildings of Rotterdam – big, large structures, weird shaped and colored, I wasn’t sure why I always felt calmer and, on a good day even happy to see the landscape of the city of Rotterdam. Apparently, there are some studies that proves that the complexity of buildings facades affects people in a positive way. I was interested to dig deeper into that topic, but my project took slightly another way when I got recommended a book Poetics of Space by a French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Labeled as a book about architecture, author examines the domestic space of our homes through poetry.

Lithuanian identity was always a part of my work. Now that I moved to Rotterdam for the second time – I feel like I have two homes. Two places in the world, where I feel myself, I feel happy and I feel at home. On the flip side – when you have two homes – something is inevitably, ultimately lost. You can’t have it all and be in the two places at the same time. After reading a part of the thesis by Nermin Saybasili during the Cihad’s seminar, I realized that I am like a ghost – stuck in between two worlds, belonging yet not  fully belonging in the both of them.

These findings got me thinking about the notion of home. I asked myself, what and where is home to me? What makes me feel at home? Do I need to have couch to sit comfortably to feel at home? What if I had to leave my home because of war and not because of privilege, where is home then? These all questions got to me during the freewriting exercise which revealed the essence of this project.

By the influence of the book and the questions I asked myself, I realized, that all the houses/homes that I have ever lived at (I moved a lot after the divorce of my parents), all the memories of home that I store within me – makes me feel at home. I started to realize this piece as a transformation of a person rather than a nostalgia for home. Transformation of a person who becomes home for him/her self.

If the project would be developed more and I did not have time restrictions, there would be 3 parts:

1.     Home as a house. First house that made me feel at home is a base of understanding about a primary feeling of home. My first home is just 1 place, I did not know any better nor worse.

2.     Home as a feeling. All the houses and homes I used to live in taught me and introduced me to these different feelings and made me understand what it mean to feel at home. Home became a feeling, not a place.

3.     I carry all the memories of my previous houses, moods, people, I know what it means and what do I need to feel at home. I house it all within me. I carry many houses inside of me – my first house, my father’s house, all the houses of mine and my mothers, my first house of my own. I bring them everywhere with me. I became a house myself because of all the previous memories and experiences. I feel good in an unfamiliar place because I have it all within me.

Poetry

I never wrote poetry myself. It is a new unknown territory for me, that I am only getting familiar with this year. I tried out the cut-out method to write something, and I really enjoyed the process and the outcome – collage of words and sentences, results in rather surrealistic text with intriguing phrases. The cut-out poetry became the base of this project – I tried to narrate the idea in non-literal way by using poetry. Written poetry became the most relevant element of this project, and it was challenge to accept it. I thought ‘But I am visual maker, not a writer, I can’t just write stuff on screen and call it a film!’. It took me a while to accept that writing sentences on screen is also a way of image making. In the making process, it was difficult to balance it out – I wanted visuals and sound not to overpower the written text. Therefore, I minimized the visual and audible material to a very minimum which resulted in this very elegant and quiet, piece

“To read poetry is to daydream” (Bachelard 38)  - my attempt was for this video to unfold as if you were reading poetry, as if it was your mind space. (Time based media? ) I chose the main visual to be an abstract, very zoomed in and slowed down image of a snow falling in the background of trees – snowy landscape might bring people back in time – in many places in the world it doesn’t snow as much anymore as it did 20 years ago. The image of the snow gets interrupted by short glitches – those are the actual images from my childhood. Most of them are from the film that my mother made when she was studying in the film school in Moscow – she made a movie about a little girl (me) who lives alone in the forest with her animals. Perhaps I was programmed to live in solitude since I was born?

In the past half year that I’ve been studying in Piet Zwart institute, I have noticed an interesting quality in my work – as I am stuck in between two worlds – I am also stuck in between two languages. My Lithuanian identity and language are very important to me – my work has always been in Lithuanian. But because of the academic circumstances and my 2^nd home in Rotterdam – every work that includes language has to be translated to English. In my most recent 2 projects translated text became a part of the visual instead of being just a functional subtitle. I would like to research it further – to work with texts on the screen as a way to connect my two worlds. (Jean Luc Godard)

I realized my way of working mostly is process/research based – without actually having a concrete final goal, I am collecting and adding new material in the process until it reaches a certain point. It is a very comfortable way of working, but in the projects with sensitive deadlines the projects might fail to reach their full potential. Therefore, I am interested to engage more into script writing to gain more power over my works. In the near future, I would like to challenge myself to make a fiction film, perhaps it would be a hybrid – fiction merged with documentary. I want to make a film about love/obsession which would relate to Lithuanian mythology perhaps a nowadays story of Lithuanian goddess of Love – Milda.

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first outline

1.     Moving image making, films, video ‘art’, 2 languages, post-totalitarian, Lithuanian, living in between 2 worlds, feeling-based, personal, texts, texts on screen, poetry, surreal, cinematic mixed with experimental, (too) abstract, (sur)real, documentary, (literally) poetic documentary, identity, re-connecting experimental, archive, interview, observational, cut-out, challenge, speak up.

2.     Writing methods (and more) that seemed to work for me :

- Stream of consciousness;

- Cut-out method;

- Translating from Lithuanian to English

           Readings :

-       Poetics of Space (Gaston Bachelard)      

-       Vilniaus Pokeris (Ričardas Gavelis)

-       Tūla (Jurgis Kunčinas)

3.     Took a very abstract, experimental way de-attached from more obvious/commercial making, less technical more personal, more poetic. Was great exploring these new ways of creating, next step would be connecting these two and making something that is rich technically yet has poetic, abstract artistic qualities. Developing new technical skills (graphic design, blender, audition) and applying it to my creative world.

4.     Working with typography and film, engaging into writing scrips of fiction and documentary. Starting working on the film about love/obsession – connect it to Lithuanian mythology (Milda – goddess of love). I want to connect documentary and fiction, gain more power over my projects, make it work instead of let it work by itself. More planning, organizing, collecting NEW material (opposed to working with the one I already have) producing more.

5.