dovydas laurinaitis

My artistic practice centres on the realm of memories, and themes of shame, identity and belonging. Initially tapping into performance as a healing medium, I collapse the private into the public, using the narrative of my life as material, fictionalising and transforming memories into something beautiful and sometimes camp, all the while establishing these experiences to be part of a collective continuum shaped by socio-political circumstances. My performances are invitations for tenderness, sincerity and connection, reckoning with the cynicism encroaching such gestures. Another ongoing question in my performance practice is the idea of ‘liveness’—where it can be found, how it may be suspended and the way it’s affected by mediatisation.

My writing practice is more preoccupied with collective memory, or the concept of the past, as a nation-state-building political tool used to prioritise certain narratives about groups of people and establish parts of their identities as essential and unquestionable, legitimising a chosen version of the present. I have run workshops on the practice of ‘guerilla commemoration’ at Kaunas Artists’ House, Ugly Duck in London and for a group of young artists from across Europe in Budapest (as part of a week-long residency programme). Based on the notion that people are the building blocks of the spaces they inhabit, these workshops search for new gestures, symbols and monuments towards events deemed important to place inside the container of our collective memory, trying to understand the way the individual is integrated into the whole through collective reading, writing, visual poetry, performance and ritual.