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"Portraits of citizens"
After i left my home country Lithuania and during my residency period in Berlin I was confronted with difficulties defining myself in a new space. This process drew my attention to several key features of one's personal status. I am a citizen among others. Who are we?
I concluded that its sources are to be found in multiple paradoxes. Citizenship involves both a sense of national identification, as well as the more specific notion of being an urban resident, and is central to a human subject's self-awareness. Contradictions arise between the city as an object, which I describe as a place or space within time, and the subjects inhabiting it - citizens - who do not merely exist as particular points at a particular moment. The individual effects of this abstract paradox on people's destinies, the traces of it on a citizen's daily life -- these were the subjects of my work.
I believe that the citizens' faces, their body lines, silhouettes, movements, characters, moods and their personal spaces reveal both the history and future of our society in general. Portraying them, I came to find out that time is meaningless within my exploration of a citizen's impact on the viewer. When does a person become a citizen, as a city dweller? How? Why? I think that the decision is a result of not fully conscious or deliberate choices and mainly related to a certain lifestyle and state of mind. It is a transformation for which, among other things, each has to pay a considerable price.
The price of both strong individual competition and group membership achieved through social learning and systematic behavior is constantly growing. But in the end we are all vulnerable individuals, strangers one to another and to the whole social system at its formal level.