Conference Hall
Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts
E. A. Jonušo g. 3
Nida LT-93127
A geological reality can be envisaged as a subject with agency and emotions, a psychic landscape, in an animistic intent that turns ‘something’ into someone to be addressed in a vocative that may summonun expected ways of communication. Striated, undulating, soft surfaces can manifest writings yet to be deciphered, opening space for non-normative beauty and sensory polysemy to occur. Fashioned as empty and barren in the orientalist narrative, to be made ‘bloom’ and exploited by the coloniser, the desert is felt like an alterity code, just as language can exist in a spectrum of nuances – alphabets, touchand proprioception, feelings, love like wavelengths affecting each other. Like threads that can sustain heavy loads and conform paths and labyrinths to navigate vulnerability, vibration networks can interrogate how ties established between human and non-human oscillate between being oppressive and beautifully mutually binding.
Alba Mayol has experienced the desert at the Parnidis Dune, walking through it and getting to know the morphology and environmental conditions, focusing on the body as main sensory translator. The history of the Curonian Spit, its extinct language and pre-Christian belief systems, its architecture and fishing tradition have been other influential elements. She has been working with poetry, drawing and sculpture using fabrics, threads, oxidised metal, clay and slimy materials.
Witnessing the desert existing in their own terms, with their own codes, imagining how to decipher them like poetry suggests, not sanctioning any truth, through fluids, wounds and scars, opening utopian imagination, it may become possible to read surfaces that were never empty, but full of potentialities for beauty and liberation.
Supported by Institut Ramon Llull.
