Artūras Mitinas
The uncanny in the context of social sterility
The concept of nejauka, which in classical psychoanalysis defines the phenomenon of unheimlich, has a much broader meaning in the Lithuanian language, encompassing more general meanings of social friction and interpersonal discomfort. By using the more commonly used word nejauka instead of the terms the uncanny or unheimlich, I consciously seek to point to sensations that go beyond the framework of classical psychoanalysis and restore their dimension of externality and interpersonalism. Often, such ‘places’ of discomfort and friction are permeated with distant personal and social memories, worn out by their everydayness, triviality, lack of focus, or subconscious repression. However, under certain circumstances, these forgotten memories can resurface in unexpected forms, familiar and close things can reveal an unexpected, foreign, unknown side.
Such reversals of meaning and perception can sometimes be dramatic, but they can also be quite subtle and difficult to grasp. Subtle feelings of discomfort and irritation activate social and psychological reactions, mechanisms of attendance and adaptation that are difficult to notice in everyday life and do not necessarily reach significance, culmination, or even consciousness. Accordingly, research, creative, and curatorial approaches may not be dramatic at all, but rather oriented toward tacit knowledge, bodily memory, slow immersion, observation, and repetition—allowing inconsistencies, discontinuities, and fractures to reveal themselves and emerge to the surface without prior narrative direction.
The uncomfortable reactions that I explore in my artistic and curatorial practice are most often triggered by bodily, spatial, and material experiences. They can be activated by redirected light, material and symbolic oppositions, dialogues with space or its cleansing, works that draw attention to what is already interesting or strange in the environment. The specific spaces in which exhibitions or events are curated are often characterized by heterotopic ambiguity—they have lost their original purpose and linger on the periphery of the dwellers attention. By emphasizing historical inconsistencies and fractures the possibility of a new relationship with spaces is created. All of this can also be said in a figurative sense about ‘inner spaces’, when in my creative and writing practice, drawing on forgotten artistic material or memories, I look back on personal stages of life that are distant in time. The purpose of these reflections is also to penetrate through a web of personal discomfort and to approach universal emotions, affects, and intensities that may still be indirectly forming the backdrop of social everyday life. I treat these practices as a kind of exercise in anti-sterility, unhurriedness and dwelling.
Illustration: Nejauka, VRM kultūros, pramogų ir sporto rūmai, Vilnius, photographer Lukas Mykolaitis.
