Fasting Off/On the Mother Tongue, 2011 – re-mastered 2015

Installation of a performance

20min. long video documentation, table, chair, notebook, pen 

Two months before going off to four month long exchange studies from the country I grew up in – Iceland, to my native country – Lithuania, I prepared myself mentally to not speak Lithuanian during my study period: 7th of February-18th of May. The idea for this long performance started with the irritating question “Do you feel more Icelandic or Lithuanian?” and the other way around. The performance was also a research trying to find out if one could forget one's native tongue (first language attrition) and learn it anew by going to beginners language courses. It all ended with a ritualistic performance showing that by going to Lithuania as an immigrant and not an emigrant (with an Icelandic passport), I filled all four check mark boxes – immigrant and emigrant in Lithuania and immigrant and emigrant in Iceland. The performance evoke various emotions from enragement and avoidance to adornment among the tightly knit community of textile artists. All of that was still somewhat visible when the performance was shown as a video documentation with the story behind it in 2015. The story of the performance had spread around the art academy. The video was presented with a table, a chair, a notebook and a pen. The viewers (with the knowledge of alumni's participation) were invited to write down their view on the performance and whether they had met the artist or they heard about it from friends. 

A 5 hour performance inspired by Nordplus Junior Class Exchange project "Career guidance as a successful guarantee for the quality of education".  "Often as we stay in one place, we only get to see things from one perspective, the perspective of our families and surrounding as well as ancestors. Once you're taken outside the box and put into another one, you might see how "discoloured" or old-fashioned youth ways of living were or even vice versa, the new community seems to believe in some kind of creatures, which never existed... There are differences. The different ways are often called - The alternative ways (i.e. of medicine). More and more, these formerly unknown cultures become a part of our own and the alternatives become the "right & common way". Therefore, I decided to experiment a bit with these so-called alternatives. The first task would be: seeing a Vedic Astrologer who could calculate my pre-born chosen pathways and determine what my talents are and other peculiar things about my life (like, what does my name say about me and how it influences my thinking and choices I make, such as career planning). This eventually lead to a summing-up of all the information I've collected so-far from my relatives (talents in genes) and the ones calculated by the astrologer. This scheme eventually turned onto a "pathway" which I still refer to when stuck on the crossroads.