vertimo vertimas

2023 Ubiškės3 Residency (‘Smoke Nest’ exhibition, curated by Ana Lipps and Liuka Jefremovaitė)

vertimo vertimas (Eng. a translation of a translation) continued my exploration of transcultural identity, following from 2019’s Kalbėk English and 2021’s Speak Lietuviškai. The performance used the landscape of Ubiškės village (island, lake, shore) to retrace the path of translating one’s identity (core, transition, outside) through language. The state of being transcultural (belonging to more than one culture) allows a process of triangulation to occur, whereby separating what belongs to each culture, the person’s ‘core’ (allegedly belonging to no culture), is located.

I took the melody of a local folk song, ‘Mažam kambarėlį ugnelę kuriu’, and forced it to fit around a new text (first written in English, then personally and imperfectly translated into Lithuanian), in which surrealist imagery and the dissolution between the self and the environment, retell my immigration story. While the song, accompanied by the rhythmic cutting of the shears, took on the traditional image of field labour underscored by singing (used to pass time, maintain pace, express emotion), my presence and approach to this act queered it. Through this process of ‘glitching culture’, the gaps began to reveal themselves, leaking traces of the core outside, and that which cannot be said became heard.

It is a performance about

noticing the moth holes in my clothes that upon closer inspection appear to be windows,

attempting innate melodies that sulk in my throat and refuse to open the door,

shoving awkward words in a dusty bag and rushing for the next train on a circular railway with two conductors chasing each other,

trying to remember when I started calling the copier glass home,

and wondering why the land cuts and stings the bare feet wanting to embrace it.

Photos by Ovidijus Adomavičius