Daughter of Serpents Queen. #Berlin
Dalia Kiaupaitė Daughter of Serpents’ Queen. (Re)mapping identity #BERLIN Video installation It was a calm and warm September evening in 2019. I was visited by two foreign artists. After an intensive day of picking and preparing mushrooms and berries spent in forests and fields, along rivers, we were sitting on the terrace of my countryside home in Lithuania. Then, for the first time in my life, I heard a compliment that my relationship with nature is as exceptional as well as my knowledge. Who? Me? I am a city girl who basically grew up on a sidewalk. I hold the fresh and heady air of the Lithuanian countryside responsible for that! The guests left, but the seed was already sown. This realization has guided me to the origins of a myth: the narrative surrounding Eglė - the Queen of Serpents, which is one of the most well-known Lithuanian fairy tales with many references to the Baltic mythology. The tale features not only human–reptile shapeshifting, but irreversible human–tree shapeshifting as well. Eglė (Eng. Spruce) who is a rural girl who marries the King of Serpents and moves to live together in the sea. There she gives birth to 4 children: 3 sons and one daughter, who is the youngest one - Drebulė (Eng. Aspen). Then by visiting her mother‘s relatives ashore she betrays her chthonic father. Finally, Eglė turns herself and all four of the children into trees. Drebulė too never came back to her native sea. Since then, I was questioning myself – where exactly is my own shore? Which cultural background is dominating my mindset? All the while growing up in Eastern Europe, I was seeking to be as West European as possible. At the same time, I felt pretty contradicted about that. I remember how I went through the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 for the first time. Now, after 30 years a natural answer came to my mind – I need to drop me again in Berlin. In the city, which has both backgrounds. It all started around mid-April 2021. I arrived here in Berlin, while the city was still under the COVID lockdown. I felt so lonely and invisible, but then while discovering the city step by step, I also discovered that I am not alone with this kind of feeling. There are a lot of other human beings around me who are searching for the same things. I started to meet women from diverse cultural backgrounds. Our prolonged encounters usually happened during the time when day turns into the night, when culture turns into nature and when the masculine vibrant city turns into the mystic underworld of the wild woman. Wild woman becomes the inspiration and the goal. She wanders into the future, yet she keeps turning back in search of the present moment. * *Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Women Who Run with the Wolves Barefoot and open-hearted I walked through Berlin following in the footsteps of these wonderful women I have met here - Oihane Amurrio (ESP), Weiwei (CHN), Stefanie Bechtold (GER), Inti (ARG), Laura Konti (GRC), Viktorija Mamontovaitė (LTU), Nerm (GER), Rituparna Rana (IND) and others. Each of their stories have inspired, uplifted, and strengthened me on my own. The video installation Daughter of Serpents' Queen (Re)mapping identity #BERLIN is an invitation to look around and see the transition, which is happening near us every day, every minute. To recognize and to support someone near us, who keeps going to the sea and then coming back in order to travel forward all the time. The main feature - Daughter of Serpents’ Queen is a video installation. (Re)mapping identity #Berlin is accompanied by paintings created during the AiR program at the SCOPE BLN, in which Dalia Kiaupaitė research diverse points of view to time and space. Sound design: Massimiliano Cerioni and Eduardo Pesole Video effects and postproduction: Dániel Molnár
