Page 69 - AC-1-2

Arts & Communication Textile agency in art

entire ammunition of coffee breaks, Christmas tree high curtain is from a photograph taken in the beautiful
toys, a pompous vase and a gas mask, glass flasks, valley of the river Dubysa. It captures a view of a meadow
test-tubes, distillers, siphons of various shapes on the at the time of the flowering of the silences. Behind the
windowsill, on the table, there is a box of seals, a figure opening and closing of the floral cloth lies the black square
of an athlete on a granite block, a Christmas card, a of Stalinist repression. In between, a duality of experiences
diary with pencil drawings in it, and neat notes on unravels. Life was disrupted by Stalin’s dictatorship, but
experiments, but most importantly – a music hall song the soundtrack echoes with voices of love and hope: the
that filled the room (and was hummed by more than a letters written by exiled men to their beloved women are
few spectators) .” read, including a short postcard from a mother to her son,
[17]
The objects exhibited in the “Cabinet of Curiosities” vividly testifying to historical memory.
joined the contours of the portrait of the heroine who The author drew inspiration for the installation
worked in the rayon silk plant. She embodied all the images from the history of her family. By reviving her own
of a progressive Soviet woman shaped by Soviet ideology: reminiscences, she gradually began to fill in the general
a prize-winning, productive worker and inventor, a cavities of historical memory. On a visit to her aunt’s
social activist, a leisure-time participant in sports and house, the artist discovered that her grandmother still kept
cultural activities, a good housekeeper, and a caring letters written to her by her husband, a political prisoner
mother. However, the life of this woman, an employee of who was sentenced to 10 years in the labor camps of the
a thriving plant that for decades “not only fed the city but Omsk region, under her pillow. The two beloved ones were
also sweetened it with chemicals ,” ended very early. The connected by threads of compressed thoughts about life
[18]
aspirations and images of ideology do not coincide with and confessions of love, which prompted her to search
reality, and the fate of the individual does not fit into the for more such correspondence documents full of sensual
framework of social realism. The “archeology” of the past factuality, leading her to the Genocide and Resistance
not only takes us back but also metaphorically conveys Research Centre of Lithuania. The author selected personal
what is hidden deep in the folds of reality. letters written to women from places of deportation in the

The folds of the draperies of personal and collective 1950s, which managed to escape strict censorship. She
memory were stirred by the interactive installation treated these letters, which survived as marginal texts, as
“Curtain of Memory” (2018) (Figure 6), exhibited at authentic threads leading to an understanding of human
Kaunas and Vilnius railway stations. The monumental relationships. In this way, she retransmitted the voices of the
artwork dedicated to the memory of the Siberian deportees past that had fallen into oblivion as affecting ego documents
shifts into an exploration of one’s painful past. It reflects encoding emotional states. The thread sensually elaborates
the history of the nation through personal letters and on the fate assigned to a human being and weaves the
postcards that the exiles wrote to their loved ones. The silent fabric of shared memory in a unique way, expressed
installation consists of two parts: a “memory cloth” and a by the imagery of the flowering meadow that brings one
soundtrack. The motif of the 5-meter-long and 7-meter- back through memory to the homeland of one’s parents
and grandparents, who had lived through a painful history.
Linking minimalist esthetics with meditation, the artwork
simultaneously reflects on the very personal correspondence
of the contributors as an invisible network of personal
connections and, at the same time, brings them together
into a single reflection on historical and cultural memory,
which takes on a pure openness and simple certainty.
What unites these artistic projects is the search for the
memory of the lived world. The author seeks authenticity
by reflecting on everyday experiences, weaving the threads
of these experiences into networks of memory and
identity. Through memory, she thematizes identity while
continuing to reflect on the female experience. In this
process, she conceptualizes textiles as a field of sensuality,
involving it in an intricate dialogue between the human
Figure 6. Monika Žaltauskaitė Grašienė, Memory Shroud, 700 × 1400 cm, self and the material agency. These installations open up
2018. © Monika Žaltė. further possibilities for interpreting the artworks in the

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 9 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1867