Emilija Škarnulytė — À propos — Slash Paris

Škarnulytė’s video follows the artist’s grandmother, Aldona, during her daily walk through Grūtas Park in Lithuania. Founded ten years after the collapse of the USSR, this privately-owned sculpture park features close to a hundred Soviet-era statues collected from all over the country. As similar statues were often taken down or destroyed in neighboring Soviet countries, the exhibition center became a unique yet controversial resource. In the video, viewers witness Aldona groping for these monuments along the leafy forest road and gently caressing their surfaces to feel their cracks and comprehend their scale. Aldona is revealed to be visually impaired, so holding, patting, and touching the monuments with her hands becomes her process of uncovering and comprehending the past.

Emilija Škarnulytė explores the psychological power that our environment holds over us. Intertwining fiction with documentary, her videos and multimedia installations ponder the invisible relations between the physical world and our social imaginary, from the notion of geologic time and its influence on our relation with history to the way violent conflicts inscribe themselves in the earth’s structure and vice versa.