Confession, 2025

Sound, light

“Confession” To hear another, you need to enter their light. The audio installation “Confession” is a study of acculturation processes through the personal stories of people forced to leave Belarus and find themselves in Lithuania. This project focuses on the transitional state, the search for oneself in a new cultural environment and the internal experiences of adaptation. The project consists of anonymous monologues. The participants’ responses represent a “confession” filled with various emotions, reflections and contradictions. These are stories of searching for a new home, facing the unknown and trying to preserve oneself in a new environment. These monologues create a polyphonic sound fabric of space, where each voice is not just a story of moving, but an act of recognition, vulnerability and an attempt to understand one’s experience. As an artist and a person who has experienced forced displacement, I sought to find consonance between my experiences and the voices of other people who, like me, represent creative professions. Artists, photographers, writers, art scientists – those who most acutely feel and convey reality through their work. Their perception of a new space, adaptation to a new environment and their special view of the integration processes became the basis for this project. Polyphony symbolizes the collective displacement of people, where each voice is unique, but at the same time dissolves in the general noise. It is a metaphor for the difficult path of acculturation, where individual stories are often lost in the general narrative. A ray of light turns chaos into focus. It gives the viewer the opportunity to hear one story, one confession, leaving him alone with the personal and important. This is an invitation to attentiveness – to hear not the “crowd”, but the person behind it. The interview recordings are saved with deliberate roughness and “noises”. This choice emphasizes the imperfection and fragility of acculturation processes, where voices sound through the background hum of reality – the noise of the city, fragments of phrases, breathing, pauses. These “imperfections” create the effect of presence, as if the listener is eavesdropping on someone else’s confession, which is filled with reality and life. The noises make each story lively and vulnerable, like the experience of moving itself. The anonymity of the interview preserves the principle of the secrecy of confession, where the speaker remains hidden, but his voice sounds loud. This emphasizes the fragility and honesty of the stories that were given to the artist as an act of trust. The space is dark, like the process of adaptation itself: the path to light begins from the unknown. This play of light and sound emphasizes the transition from chaos to understanding, from invisibility to presence. The viewer, like a participant in a confessional ritual, enters into an intimate dialogue with someone else’s, but at the same time so close, experience. All the participants in the project have gone through different experiences of moving and integration. The diversity of stories shows that the process of acculturation cannot be the same for everyone. Each voice is unique, just like the path that brought a person to Lithuania. Through performative interaction with sound and space, the viewer lives the emotional experience of transition – from isolation to dialogue. The installation “Confession” is an invitation to hear and understand. Here, each voice becomes visible and significant, and the viewer is the one who can “share” this space, this light, these stories. The voices sounding in the darkness become not just testimonies, but bridges connecting “one’s own” and “someone else’s”, “here” and “there”.