Emilija Škarnulyte

Aldona

In the video Aldona, the artist follows her grandmother, Aldona, during her daily walk through the Grutas Park in Lithuania. Founded ten years after the collapse of the USSR, this privately-owned sculpture park features close to a hundred Soviet-era statues collected from all over the country. As similar statues were often taken down or destroyed in neighboring Soviet countries, the sculpture park became a unique yet controversial resource. Avoiding both museumification and destruction, the park offers an alternative destination for markers of a painful past. In the video, viewers witness Aldona groping for these monuments along the leafy forest road and gently caressing their surfaces to feel their cracks and comprehend their scale. With the statues no longer occupying places of prominence in city centers, Škarnulyt? highlights their accessibility as Aldona interacts with them by running her hands across their surfaces. Aldona is revealed to be visually impaired, so holding, patting, and touching the monuments with her hands becomes her process of uncovering and comprehending the past through its physicality. In the spring of 1986, the nerves of Aldona’s eyes were poisoned, probably due to the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant explosion. The work reveals the importance of tactile and physical experiences of history, expanding cultural knowledge beyond visual manifestations, while addressing the complicated status of public monuments in regards to the histories they commemorate. Aldona is a highly personal work for the artist whose grandmother was very instrumental to her development as an artist.