Returning To My Own Body
The Artist In Conversation With Her Body
If you are new or have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art for the very first time, welcome to this text that will take you through the process of self discovery from the Lithuanian photographer and journalist Kristina Aleksynaitè. If a friend forwarded you this article, double welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?
It Knows Everything
Talking about the body was not common in my family where I grew up. And it couldn't have been any other way.
My earliest memories of my childhood were shaped by the Soviet era, not to mention my parents, who spent half of their lives there. The naked body did not exist in that period. Neither did sex. No one talked about the body, let alone the abuse that women were subjected to because it was considered their own fault. Or about homosexual relationships. All that "did not exist".
No wonder that the first exhibitions I saw are so deeply etched in my memory. I remember the naked bodies, the sand, something secret, unknown, wicked. The second memory is of the photographer's father's eternal death. I see the old man's bony chin, his beard that has barely grown back, his jaws that have fallen in, and the whole of him, lying in bed.
I took a similar photo a couple of months ago, after my grandmother died. Although she has passed away, she has retained a kind of grandeur, beauty, and uniqueness that she had throughout her life. Her body was so unrecognizable, but hiding under a very blue dress, it spoke not in form but in substance.
Those rare trips out on the town with my mother to visit a museum were always a surprise. I was so uncomfortable, but so curious. All of a sudden, my mother, a woman suffocated by the Soviet era, would come alive when she found herself in an exhibition. In this way, perhaps without realizing it herself, she opened up my imagination, which eventually blossomed into maturity.
Discovering My Own Body
The strangest thing is that I have absolutely no photos of myself as a child. Living in the poor conditions of the time, my parents didn't think it was important, so we never had framed photos in our house. Just a few of me and my brother in an empty album. So I basically do not know what I looked like as a child, although I remember myself from a very early age - 1.5 years.
Even though I was relatively well-liked and accepted, I always felt a certain discomfort, as if my body, although beautiful, was not listening to me. As if it and I were two different entities.
Until quarantine came to all our homes. Unable to create in my photo studio and forced to spend endless time with my family between four walls, I began to suffocate in every sense. My body no longer listened to me. I couldn't sleep, the food became unpalatable, I wanted to break free from some kind of limitation, but I couldn't. Just like all of us around the world.
I realized that I have to create under any conditions, with the tools I have today. My body and the things it touched were closer to me.
I started the series with a self-portrait. After a day of worries, I asked my family to go out for a walk in the city. I was tired. I had no idea what the work was supposed to be about. I took a bath. I crawled into the water and I realized it was going to be about my image. I'm talking about fear. The fear of the unknown these days, the feeling of insecurity, nakedness, vulnerability.
I have been afraid of going underwater without covering my nose since I was a little girl. I submerge while holding the phone. I got scared, the water got into my palate, I coughed.
And slowly, day by day, a series of 40 photographs about the body and feelings was born. The body was my closest choice.
So I started to explore my identity first, and eventually, after many photos, I started to feel a connection with the whole of humanity and the common experiences we have.
Fake Body
When we see endless images of naked bodies in the media every day. Often beautiful, eroticised, perfect, designed to please someone.
I also find Instagram photos interesting. The fake reality, the quest for perfection. The desire to please. The desire to stay young forever. The desire to show our vitality through sexuality. Is this photography? It speaks a lot to me, too. I go through people's profiles and I see them in real life - sad, embarrassed, with families, and completely different. Just like my life, which is not at all reflected on Instagram.
Sometimes I also use a "beautifying" filter and immediately get a few friend requests, questions about how I'm doing? Then I delete it and I want to be non-superficial, thoughtful, open to the core again. Until the next time, when I want to play outside of myself again.
These fake games are exhausting. I feel tired after such experiments. Forgetting myself. I always want to go back to my home, I always want to go back to my real body. Virtual reality will never replace the truth.
The feminine part is screaming that this is wrong, that it is violence against us women. The erotic portrayal of the 'perfect' woman, which has been perpetuated by men throughout history makes me angry and I no longer want to be part of it.
The Body Is The Context
Finally, I want to return to poetry, to music, to nature. To the real. No matter how tired, flabby, disheveled the body is, it is a tree with all its splits, its earth-covered roots, its poisonous, yellowing leaves. The body may smell of divine roses and swamp mud. And still it will be beautiful.
One picture I saw in the “Fotografiska Museum” in Stokholm is deeply embedded in my memory. It is Julia’s SH's photo of three women's bodies, covered in flour like loaves of bread, reminded me of my mother's swollen thighs, her hugs before school, her sweat in the weary garden, and her endless love. These bodies speak to me a thousand times louder and closer than any work of art with a perfectly sculpted figure.
I always return to the artist Violeta Bubelytė. She is known as the first Lithuanian photographer to turn her lens on her nude self. How beautiful. So deep. Full-bodied. How much has been said.
The Body Speaks For Itself
Sometimes I'm afraid that my body says too much, I still want to hide, but I look at Marina’s Abramović’s work and I see the violence she has experienced and how she immerses herself in a certain state where she frees herself, without blaming anybody, without pointing fingers at her abusers, only talking about herself.
One of Lithuania's most interesting artists, Svajonė and Paulius Stanikai, known as "SetP Stanikas", use the body in a straightforward, even blasphemous way. Sex acts, distorted degraded faces, gross body parts... The straight truth about us.
I'm flipping through the book “Girl on Girl” by Charlotte Jansen and I hear all these women's voices talking about issues that are important to them. It is shocking, repulsive, eroticising, smile-inducing, some iconic, some realistic. All different.
For example, having the courage to laugh at their bodies makes me feel vulnerable and it exposes my sensitive body parts also.
The Transcendence To Essence
In the series "Before Leaving," I photograph myself being vulnerable at the present moment in the face of my changes - migration, lost identity and existential questions.
With the scraps of gauze I create a sculpture of myself. It is as if she freezes and immortalizes my body under the wet texture of the material and looks from the side, asking what kind of sculpture-human being I am today. It’s like stopping a moment, as it goes so fast and noticing myself clearly. It’s a process of self-knowledge, the purification, the transcendence to essents.
Know yourself, see yourself, don't lie to yourself, meet yourself. Sometimes it seems to me that by using bodies in art, women are healing their traumas. Knowing again, discovering, reclaiming their bodies. And if it helps other women to experience the same thing when they look at the artwork, isn't it worth it to keep creating openly?
After three years of photographing myself I can say I have found peace with my body. I don't put so much effort into pleasing others, I want to please myself first. I allow it to be imperfect. I ask my body more and more often - are you okay in this situation or is it time to get out of here. And it always has the best answer.
Today I have a lot of photos of myself and I am not sorry that noone captured “that” childhood. I know it today, through my own body, because it remembers everything.
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