Knock Knock Knock:
Triptique of Sound-Based Performance
Three sound-based works exploring war, inherited grief, and the experience of emigration
A looping audio of knocking, concealed within the stairwell architecture so that its source cannot be identified. Visitors moving through the space hear the sound but cannot locate it; the search for its origin becomes part of the work itself.
The piece draws on the experience of living at a remove from danger while it remains intimately close. Growing up in a place where the threat of war is not abstract, and returning home only briefly, the work holds the particular tension of that position: guilt and gratitude, fear and the discomfort of safety. The knocking does not escalate or resolve. It continues at the same volume and pitch, indifferent to who is listening.
Two speakers facing each other, playing a stretched and distorted recording of a 54-minute conversation with my grandmother. Between them, two small ceramic bowls on the floor, one representing the sun and the other the moon, both filled with amber she collected on the shore of the Baltic Sea in Palanga, Lithuania. The title, material list, and date were printed and pinned to the wall above one of the speakers.
The amber holds time physically. My grandmother's habit of gathering it felt like an act of quiet accumulation, grief made into something you can hold. Her voice in the recording is stretched beyond recognition and yet still hers. The bowls sit as offerings, as a vigil. Kneeling to look at them is part of the work.
The piece grew from gratitude, from wanting to acknowledge what passes down through women in families: not only tenderness but the weight of it. Depression is inherited. So is the capacity for beauty. The title is sincere.
A travel bag, placed and then opened. Inside: personal belongings, Lithuanian books, gifts intended for friends who share my background and friends who do not. Objects chosen for the comfort they carry precisely because they are familiar and, to those who grew up with them, unremarkable.
The word "emigrant" holds specific weight in Lithuanian. It is used often, and not gently, carrying undertones of betrayal and the privilege of leaving. Naming the piece as I did was a way of holding that accusation without resolving it.
Inviting viewers to open the bag introduced a brief hesitation, a moment of intrusion not unlike having your belongings inspected at a border. The bag itself is generic, intentionally so. The unpacked bag is the documentation of the unpacking, both the act and its aftermath constituting the work. The "Learn Lithuanian" book sits among the items as an offer and a question: an entry point for those outside the culture, and a signal to those within it of everything that cannot quite be translated.
