S-MOM. Monika Dirsytė "We"

About

Monika Dirsytė (LT). "We"

Monika Dirsytė has been creating performances and installations professionally for more than a decade.

“Visuality, strength of emotion and empathy are of the highest importance to me. In my work I seek to “shake” topics that are stigmatized or often manipulated. The performances I create are quite demanding not only psychologically but also physically as they are usually prolonged. Over the course of ten years on the creative path I discovered my style, my methodology which now I apply when performing. In my opinion, the best outcome of creative work is people's reaction which forces us to ask questions although we not always can answer them. The art of performance is a philosophy to me, a way of thinking inseparable from action.

However, biggest performance of my life – becoming a mother. Sometimes it seems to be so difficult, feeling overwhelmed with endless daily chores. Scattered toys, burnt pancakes and endless amounts of diapers. Then, there is the daily life requiring you just to move forward. Honestly, it is so challenging to manage it all. Even impossible, I would say. It is hard to raise a child on your own, however, a sense of humor and lots of love does help. We learned to live the way we manage to. Sometimes it means wearing different socks or tangled curls, however, that is not the point. Relationships and love is the key."

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Silence.

It is different for everyone.

Silence can be an aspiration, dream, impossibility, and sometimes the most dangerous force.

Ieva Brikė talks about one kind of silence, Kainulainen & Latva see their silence differently, while Guadalupe Aldrete perceives the silences in her own way.

An insane desire to find a moment of silence, or perhaps a drop of courage to tear up the silence.

In the “Book of Silence” Sarah Maitland talks about the discovery of positive silence so familiar to many mothers. It happens when you wake up in the middle of the night and the baby finally calms down after the feed, as your everyday life broken down fatigue, immerses you in a strange state between sleep and wakefulness: “That strange time before dawn, when the darkness, silenced world and even the cities are exceptional <...>”

Still, all of us have different experiences.

The S Mom platform started with a desire to speak, a desire to hear other voices, unpopular voices, muted voices, sometimes voices not wanting to be heard, and sometimes afraid to be spoken.

Talking about (un) motherhood in an unpopular, painful, deep way.

Talking about choices and freedoms. The body of a mother, a child, society’s body.

We are all performance artists, so we express ourselves best not by speaking words, but using our bodies and ourselves. During this global pandemic, having lost our main tool, our physical contact with another human-being, we still choose not to remain silent and, like many others, move our projects online.

December 8-12 / Video performance program on – https://vimeo.com/user60248187:

Kainulainen & Latva (FI)
Nicola Hunter (GB)
Guadalupe Aldrete (MX / AT)
Vaida Tamoševičiūtė (LT)

The event is curated by Vaida Tamoševičiūtė

The event is partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.