Home (2015)

Project “Home” dedicated to Joseph Brodsky was specially made for the issue ‘Lithuanian nocturne’ of the Art magazine “Iskusstvo” and was on display at the gallery “Arka” (Vilnius, Lithuania, 2015).

The repeating motives in poetry of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky are emigration and search for home. These topics are also important for us: born in Russia, we spent three years in one European country and have been living for five years in another. Nowadays “Home” looks like something very fragile, old, precious that can fall apart even from a single touch or a reminiscence. It is not just nostalgia about one’s home or motherland, but rather impossibility of having home at all, its non-ending search and the desire to have one. This is a symbol of our time with its ever-growing migration rates. The concept of home seems to be getting lost forever. During his wandering Joseph Brodsky came to the conclusion that home of a poet is his poetry only, this is “the meaning guarded by poetry lines” [Thomas Venclova].

The poem “Lithuanian nocturne” has a certain graphical silhouette, common for “carmen figuratum” — a form of visual poetry which was popular in Middle ages. Thomas Venclova notes that the sections of “Lithuanian nocturne” are reminiscent of a human body en face. The reflected human body has a blurred contour and reminds of a ghost. “His ghost, that left the body, flies home over the ocean. Here “home” also denotes the empire from which Brodsky was exiled” [Thomas Venclova].

In our project “Home” we reflect in photographs not only the visual form of one of the sections of “Lithuanian nocturne”, but also its repetitive motives such as sea and window as refrains to boundaries. The author’s photographs are combined together with old anonymous images, found during our own wandering.