Emilija Škarnulytė
The Footstones in Night Writing
2015
-
Copyright the artist
16mm film, 5'
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
In the spring of 1986, the Chernobyl Power Plant exploded and shortly after Aldona mysteriously lost her vision. The short film The Footsteps in Stones Writing narrates the interconnection of a physical and emotional fog as the woman, the artist’s grandmother, lives—or survives—in a space anchored in neither present nor past.
Captured on 16mm film, Aldona’s daily journey to Grūtas Park, a sculpture park of Soviet-era statues and relics near Druskininkai in the southwest of Lithuania, serves as the ritualistic foci in a tactile consideration on loss—of senses, identity, and history. After annexation in 1940 and years of armed resistance against Soviet troops, Lithuania was the first republic to break away from the Soviet Union, in March 1990. Founded ten years after the collapse of USSR, the privately-owned Grūtas Park features close to a hundred Soviet-era statues collected from all over the country, becoming a unique yet controversial site. Avoiding both museumification and destruction, the park offers an alternative destination for markers of a painful past.
Aldona‘s touching process of uncovering and comprehending the physicality of the past forms a visual, haptic testimony. The weathered surfaces of towering sculptures are contrasted against the wrinkled, daintiness of Aldona’s hands, as Škarnulytė plays with duality in tone and voices—the camera shifts from night to day, lingers in the swaying shadows of trees. Aldona’s slowness and care in gestures make the artwork remarkably sensory. Surrounding her, is the monumentality of history against the greatness of nature, its cyclicality.
A delicate portrait of her grandmother’s tactile reawakening of bygone times, The Footsteps in Stones Writing haunts in its depiction of an out-of-time and out-of-space post-human disquietude and intimate grief.
