Ruta - The muffled song of the earth. Some works of art fill the viewer with curiosity to find out about their creators; they touch our most intimate selves and cause an unfathomable echo to resound in our sensitive depths, stirring and questioning the silent matrix of our being. Oh, the joys of uncanny familiarity! Ruta β two simple, playful syllables that heighten the enigma of the gaze, while leaving it free!
Who are you, Ruta, and to what do you owe your acuity? Ruta Jusionyte is a woman, a young artist, a Lithuanian. The mystery deepens; a meeting seems necessary. Fortunately, we meet in France, because I know nothing of her outlandish home country, save for the fact that it has become European. Ruta came to live and work in France at the dawn of the twenty-first century. She loves the niche that she has created for herself, without forgetting either her roots or her mother tongue.
The burden of history, the price of freedom. It is fascinating to listen to Ruta talking about the history of her little country and then taking a closer look⦠the gaze takes shape!
The history of Lithuania is an often painful tale of invasion, annexation, liberation, then occupation, extermination, and pillage, the population mistreated and forced to submit to injections of foreign culture that anaesthetized and damaged the extant indigenous culture, attempting to eradicate its age-old customs and uproot its founding myths.
Then, one day, freedom returned; a few straggling weeds heralded the revival of a smothered culture feared to be lost for good. Ruta is one such weed: tender, yielding, yet resistant, and enriched with a primitive soil that imbues her with traces of her origins. She has deliberately not returned to the fundamentals of her world, but has consented to lay herself open to sources that infiltrate her, generating forms as bizarre as narratives recounting the flesh of a profoundly ramified culture.
