WATER CASTLE
2017, Lithuania, France
16mm black & white film, 6'

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There are themes and periods that, in the inexorable passage of time, drift toward the periphery. These fragments of oblivion transform into water castles—rocky, immovable organisms encircled by water. Each castle builds its own territory, its own trajectories and tactics. It becomes difficult to reach, isolated, even dangerous to enter. In escaping the obnoxious and the painful, unwanted memories are pushed away, toward the lakes of the unconscious.

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Water Castle employs scratched and decayed Russian analog film. The footage was captured during fieldwork on the peripheries of Paris and Vilnius, focusing mainly on contemporary Afro-French communities and Russian-origin youth from Naujininkai. The outskirts of these cities seem to form distinct systems of their own, revolving around a collective sense of rootlessness—an exclusion from the center. Detached from that center, a foreign and pervasive entity, one is left holding only to a shared sense of foreignness.

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