Vilnelė

Two-channel video, Stainless steel plate
2017

Vilnia river flows from there.
People say that we live here.
People say that we will be independent.

The Constitution is written like this:
1. Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnelė, and the River Vilnelė has the right to flow by everyone.
8. Everyone has the right to be undistinguished and unknown.
39-41. Do not defeat. Do not fight back. Do not surrender.

This is Užupio Respublika, we saw it on the map.

As Paul Ricouer said:
The relationship of sense to reference is suspended…The work through the structure proper to it displays a world only under the condition that the reference of descriptive discourse is suspended. Or to put it another way, discourse in the literary work sets out its denotation as a second-level denotation, by means of the suspension of the first-level denotation of discourse…The metaphorical statement is precisely the one that points out most clearly this relationship between suspended reference and displayed reference. Just as the metaphorical statement captures its sense as metaphorical midst the ruins of the literal sense, it also achieves its reference upon the ruins of what might be called (in symmetrical fashion) its literal reference. (The rule of metaphor, p.220-221)

The work “Vilnelė” is a metaphor. The real object of reduction in the video is not the river that is seen, but the video proper and the national concept that is pointed by its second-level denotation. The questions that are continued to extend, such as what’s country, the country's imagination…, will round in the work. It describes but not explains, sketches out the possibilities of imagination rather than gives propositions. It makes the feeling brew and extend in the video, and then it generates a slight gaze.