Krow
your pain is humming in my vertebrae (2020-ongoing)
Collaboration with Dovydas Laurinatis and Iga Maria Szczepańska.
your pain is humming in my vertebrae is a performance-as-research project exploring transgenerational trauma and ancestral healing, within the context of post-soviet countries.
Through performance, workshops and digital communities, we create poetic and ritual experiments, as well as games of body-movement study. We want to examine the potentialities of a personal and ancestral transformative process, when dealing with inheritances of: addiction, cycles of toxic relating and sharing affection, patterns of unhealthy identities and so on.
We allow ourselves to become altars of conscious knowledge, a bridge between the old ones and the future peoples. How do we make our bodies and minds, inviting spaces for understanding experiences that are not only ours and for the integration of their shadows and offerings passed on?
We are particularly focused on the transition between the two socio-political regimes: a blend of utopic and dystopic dreamlands, communist and capitalist ways of organizing life.
Through the lens of biological, psycho-therapeutic and spiritual perspectives, we are questioning: how do the unaddressed emotional responses to such intense ideological changes, violent revolutions, and abrupt needs to adjust to new realities of being, influence our collective soul? How is memory alive?
Stored in the waters of our bodies/
genealogical archives of forgotten wounds,
wounds formed into nests holding seeds of undreamed intimacies,
guidance shattered in whispers,
our grandmother’s lullaby.
Our first collaborative piece within this project is 'everyone has big house, but no one lives in it', which is a workshop-performance seeking to identify, approach and integrate our ancestral inheritances. It is framed by the Soviet occupation and the times before, during and after the transition to capitalism. The first phase of this process began in December, 2020, where we traced the mother-figure ancestral line through interviews, and created poetic texts as a way to unify this knowledge within ourselves.
The project worked through a whatsapp group, as people followed our writing promps, rituals and experiments, and shared their creations via voice notes. The piece was supported by Galerija 101, from Kaunas, Lithuania.
abandoned houses play music of laughter and cries. too many doors to choose from. no clear pathways. we stay outside pretending we’re inside. it’s easier this way. we’re used to surviving off leftover hope. it’s in our blood, neurons and astral molecules. we believe ourselves to be the lonely seed, blown from the flowers of our ancestral tree. it’s difficult to grow on concrete, we think. these layers stacked up, one for each revolution. at least they keep our bodies warm at night. but we still can’t make sense of these dreams where the smell of rotting roots seeps from our collective subconscious.