ART CITIES: Paris-Eglė Budvytytė

Based in Vilnius and Amsterdam, Eglė Budvytytė works at the intersection between visual and performing arts. She approaches movement and gesture as technologies for a possible subversion of normativity, gender and social roles, and the dominant narratives governing public spaces. Spanning song, poetry, video, and performance, her practice explores the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability, and the permeable relationships between bodies, audiences, and environments.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Frac Île-de-France Archive

A major Lithuanian artist on the international scene, Ėglė Budvytytė presents “Warm Blooded and Earthbound”, her first exhibition in France at as part of the France-Lituanie season. She explores the overlap between the visual and performing arts. Her practice, which spans song, poetry, video and performance, delves into the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability and the fluid relationships between bodies, the public and environments. Encounters and collaboration are central to her work, involving other artists and users of public space and exhibitions. The exhibition is centered around a new video work, shot in different landscapes of Lithuania. The film is a speculative and performative attempt to translate the archeological research and materials, such as clay figurines and the remains of temple structures and burial sites into poetry, moving images, and choreographies of collectivity and intimacy between the body and the land. The film is a poetic exploration of intimacy between the land and the body, loosely based on the research around matrilineal societies in the neolithic period by the Lithuanian archelogist Marija Gimbutas. Another film “Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies Imploding Stars” (2020) was shot in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit on the Lithuanian border, the film is a hypnotic exploration of non-human forms of consciousness nested in symbiotic life: interdependence, surrender, death, and decay. The images gradually layer, alongside intimate lyrics of a song that channels the desires of an entity shapeshifting across genders, voices, and beyond-human embodiments. The choreography’s reliance on horizontality undoes the verticality usually attributed to the human figure, unfurling her into the landscape. Although often horizontal, the performers’ bodies are sites of activity, pulled toward the earth and one another, moving through the forest, along the sand dunes and water. Written by artist, the song lyrics draw on the work of biologist Lynn Margulis and science-fiction author Octavia Butler: the soundtrack channels Margulis in its celebration of the role of bacteria in making life and collaboration between the single-cell organisms possible; it also invokes Butler’s tropes of symbiosis, mutation, and hybridity to challenge hierarchies and categorization.

Photo: Eglė Budvytytė De sang chaud et de terre (Warm Blooded and Earthbound) [still], 2024, 4K video with sound. © Eglė Budvytytė, Courtesy of the artist

Info: Curator: Céline Poulin, The Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, 22 rue des Alouettes, Paris, France, Duration: 26/9/2024-23/2/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.fraciledefrance.com/