To Swallow the Self. A Joint Essay Exploring an Interdisciplinary Creative Process

To Swallow the Self (1)

In “Wearable Poetry”, which received the honorary SMCK ON REEL Audience Award (2) in Munich in March 2025, we – contemporary jewelry artist Neringa Poškutė-Jukumienė and poet Rosana Lukauskaitė – came together to investigate transformation through the confluence of wearable art and language. This collaborative project unfolded during a ten-day creative residency in Lisbon, supported by the “Culture Moves Europe” (3) mobility grant and mentored by Portuguese jewelry artist and researcher Cristina Filipe (4). Our central question asked how poetics could be made wearable – not just metaphorically, but materially – through an embodied, spatial, and interdisciplinary practice where the body becomes both a sensing instrument and a site of inscription. Rather than seeking a final product from the outset, we focused on process-based research, engaging the body, object, voice, and landscape in reciprocal gestures of response and resonance.

At the outset, we imagined “Wearable Poetry” as a meticulously structured video piece, complete with a scripted dialogue exploring themes of dreamscapes, doppelgängers, and displacement. Influenced by Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms and their fragmented selfhoods, we drafted initial plans around doubling, alter egos, and mirrored identities (5). We envisioned a framework of poetic text layered over staged scenes, where jewelry would act as symbolic props within a cinematic structure. Yet, as soon as we arrived in Lisbon, these fixed ideas began to dissolve. The city, with its erratic topography and intense atmospheric contrasts, insisted on participating in the process. Lisbon’s rising and falling streets, its vast, glowing façades and creeping shadows of autumn, disoriented our sense of linear authorship and destabilised our preconceived framework. What emerged was less a film and more an embodied mode of listening to place.

This was the moment when the city became our co-author – not metaphorically, but methodologically. Our response was not theoretical detachment but somatic engagement: we let go of the script. Instead of imposing a narrative on the landscape, we allowed the city’s textures, sounds, and chance encounters to shape our actions. Initially inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s exploration of alter egos and fragmented identity, we imagined his heteronyms would structure our inquiry into doubling and dream selves. Yet, through the process of working on-site, it was Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s raw melancholy that spoke most directly to the emotional landscape we encountered. His line, “In the depths of darkness I swallowed myself whole” (6), captured Lisbon’s paradox – sunlit yet shadowed, vibrant yet marked by absence. Quoting Sá-Carneiro in our narration alongside, “Those who live briefly always have something to say”, we responded to the city’s atmosphere not through pre-existing concepts, but through the affective immediacy of place – a duality we, as Lithuanian artists shaped by a lyrical tradition of melancholy, instinctively recognised.

Our methodology shifted toward a form of intuitive, site-responsive research: walking, noticing, collecting fragments, responding to place through gestures, words, and materials. The project thus evolved into what we began to call a living archive – an ongoing documentation of fleeting gestures and poetic reflections, shaped in real-time by the environment. We recorded not only what we saw or said, but how we were being in relation – to the city, to each other, to objects, to language. The process of intertwining text and materiality became central to the project’s method. This was not a conceptual pairing, but a daily practice of noticing where words and objects meet. Rosana’s practice as a poet often involves collecting fragments of language from her surroundings – overheard phrases, misspelled signs, stray thoughts written into her notes app. In Lisbon, this approach expanded: alongside language, we began collecting found objects from markets, streets, and natural sites – puzzle pieces, stones, discarded photographs, fragments of jewelry. These objects became prompts, metaphors, and sometimes direct participants in the gestures we filmed. Text and material were not imposed upon one another; rather, they accumulated in proximity, creating a field of resonance.


Still from “Wearable Poetry”, 2024, video projection.


One moment of convergence emerged at Mercado de Santa Clara, where we found a box of discarded family photographs. Two identical portraits of a young man caught our attention. We purchased them, recognising the eerie potential of these images to speak about memory, duplication, and the haunting presence of the absent. These themes resonate with our inquiry into how the body and language hold traces of presence and absence, echoing Neringa’s artistic research on “Body and Jewellery Spaces”, which treats the body as both a site of memory and a medium of spatial inscription. The duplicate images evoke the figure of the doppelgänger – central to our initial conceptual framework – and invite reflection on identity as layered, echoed, and never fully present. By engaging with found material, we explored how archives of intimacy and anonymity might wear themselves into the narrative, much like language and jewelry imprint onto the body. Neringa held the photographs while Rosana filmed their reflection in her sunglasses – layering the stranger’s image over Neringa’s face. In that intuitive moment, the city offered us a ready-made metaphor for the doppelgänger – not through symbol or script, but through matter itself. This spontaneous act physically manifested the doppelgänger motif we had originally intended to script, but now it emerged from the material conditions of place rather than from theory. The act of filming became both documentation and performance – capturing not only an image but a moment of recognition, of self encountering other.


Still from “Wearable Poetry”, 2024, video projection.


Our initial structured plans involved scenes with defined roles: Rosana as narrator, Neringa as the embodied performer, the camera following a pre-written dialogue. But the layered atmosphere of Lisbon, its unpredictability, its shifting weather and social spaces, began to undo the certainty of these roles. Rather than resisting the disruption of our plan, we treated it as methodology – embracing the city’s interference as a vital collaborator. We found ourselves drawn into a shared, entangled process where author roles were no longer separate. The act of writing poetry and the act of filming became inseparable gestures of response.

For instance, early on, we discovered Chafariz das Janelas Verdes, a neglected, near-abandoned fountain tucked between the buildings of our neighborhood. Its cracked surfaces and mossy edges evoked a quiet unease. Instead of staging a planned scene there, we responded directly to the mood of the place. We lay down on the fountain’s ledges, positioning our bodies in a way that allowed the camera to capture double exposures – our forms merging and dissolving. We filmed and moved with the logic of place rather than with pre-imagined structure. The environment dictated the rhythm of the filming; the coldness of the stone, the movement of the wind, the shadow play of late evening – all shaped our gestures. The fountain itself became a collaborator, its presence guiding how we moved and what we filmed.


Still from “Wearable Poetry”, 2024, video projection.


This responsiveness extended to sound. We did not record sound separately or treat it as an afterthought. Instead, like language and object, sound became an active, shaping element. One of the most significant discoveries was the droning hum of the 25th of April Bridge, which we first noticed while recording ambient city sounds. The vibration resembled the constant buzz of a giant beehive – at once natural and mechanical, soothing and unsettling. We returned to this sound throughout the residency – recording it from different positions, at different times of day, listening for how its tonal mood changed depending on atmospheric conditions. We began to hear it everywhere, as though it followed us across the city. It became the auditory thread that wove through the piece, layered with the narration, creating a soundscape where the spoken and the environmental fused.

The voice in the video is not simply a narrator’s voice. After writing the poetic text, Rosana chose not to use her own voice directly but instead generated the narration through AI voice synthesis – specifically selecting a tone that would resist gendering, age, and human specificity. We experimented with different synthetic voices until we found one that felt dislocated, slightly unreal, like a voice overheard in a dream. The resulting voice is neither fully human nor fully artificial. It floats between identities, much like the doubled, shifting selves we sought to explore. This decision was a deliberate extension of the project’s interest in fragmentation and echo. The voice became another layer of the archive, its disembodied quality emphasizing absence as much as presence.

Throughout the process, we returned often to the question of wearability – not simply as adornment, but as a way of carrying text and gesture on the body. Neringa’s doctoral research, “Body and Jewellery Spaces” (7), informed this aspect of our method. We treated the body as both a sensing tool and a site of inscription. By thinking through the wearable as a porous boundary between interior and exterior worlds, we explored how language, memory, and material could linger on the skin – be absorbed, carried, or shed. Adorment elements, like the black “Widow” lipstick from “Jeffree Star Cosmetics”, were introduced as ritualistic markers – simple, performative objects that could signal transformation without explanation. The lipstick, a cosmetic and symbolic artifact, stood in for both armour and intimacy, linking adornment to self-invention and narrative.


Still from “Wearable Poetry”, 2024, video projection.


The archive of fleeting gestures that we speak about is not a formal collection of objects, nor a fixed video documentation of performances, but rather an embodied, affective tracework that lives across memory, poetics, material fragments, and site-specific filmic compositions (8). It is the accumulation of small, responsive actions – movements shaped by site, chance, and relational presence. The filmed moments of touching tree roots, of hands holding photographs, of bodies dissolving into the architecture of the fountain – these became the archive. Each moment was both ephemeral and anchoring – offering us a trace of experience that was never fully visible, but somehow still residually present. The gestures were not rehearsed but emerged through the act of being present, of listening to the atmosphere of the space. This methodology of lingering – of staying with what is unresolved, half-seen, half-heard – allowed the project to hold space for contradiction. Instead of seeking closure or narrative resolution, we leaned into the instability of the process. Lisbon’s layered identity – its histories of colonial trade, its architectural beauty, its melancholic air – remained palpable in the gestures and sounds we collected.

This layered methodology – one that intertwined embodied action, poetic language, material objects, and atmospheric sound – culminated in the final video work, but it also extended beyond it. The project continues to live as an archive of sensations, textures, and impressions that shaped our time in Lisbon. The poem below, which forms part of the voiceover narration, functions not only as a script but as a residue of this shared experience – a distilled trace of the gestures, sounds, and encounters that composed our collaboration.

***
if you long to have skin
so smooth and real
so soft, somewhere beyond yourself
say mistério e sonjo
your secret
your dream
someone else has already claimed them
to God’s house, to God’s apartment
we descended from below
father was cutting trees in Latvia
always choose wood
this way you’ll know where your roots are
in the roots of the centennial fig tree
at Jardim da Estrela
you can curl up
like a cold creature of the night
nestled against the earth
Mário de Sá-Carneiro wrote
“in the depths of darkness, I swallowed myself whole”
(those who live briefly
always have something to say)
how to peel away this city
its sharp corners and abysses
Perhaps sail to Madeira
perhaps escape to Africa
mist settles over the valley
the bridge disappears into the clouds,
airplanes rise into the unknown
and you don’t know if you’ll return
the rooftops of Lisbon burn your fingers
the smoothness of the calçada pulls you towards the sea.
you’ve taken a surname from a street sign
it’s not yours here, but it feels familiar
know that Lisbon will always wait for you
even without you, it will still remember
your steps, your shadow
your other self

“Wearable Poetry” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwtzPAfk_Zg


Notes:
[1] Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Lisbon Poets, trans. Martin D’Evelin and Martin Earl (Lisbon: Antiga Shantarin, Lda, 2022), 104–105.
[2] SMCK ON REEL is an international video art screening program organized by SMCK Magazine, dedicated to exploring intersections between jewelry art, performance, and moving image. The Audience Award is determined by public vote during Munich Jewellery Week, https://www.instagram.com/p/DHOC0COM_9z/
[3] Culture Moves Europe is a European Union-funded mobility program managed by the Goethe-Institut, supporting cross-border collaborations among artists and cultural professionals across Europe. See: Goethe-Institut, “Culture Moves Europe”, https://www.goethe.de/ins/be/en/kul/eur/cme.html
[4] Cristina Filipe is a contemporary jewelry artist, curator, and researcher based in Lisbon. She is the author of Contemporary Jewellery in Portugal: From the Avant-Garde of the 1960s to the Early 21st Century (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2019).
[5] Fernando Pessoa developed the literary concept of heteronyms – fully formed alter egos with distinct biographies, writing styles, and philosophical perspectives – as a means of exploring multiple, often contradictory identities within one authorial body. These figures, such as Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos, enabled Pessoa to fragment the notion of selfhood and resist a singular narrative voice. For more, see: Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography (New York: Liveright, 2021); and Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin Classics, 2001).
[6] Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Lisbon Poets, trans. Martin D’Evelin and Martin Earl (Lisbon: Antiga Shantarin, Lda, 2022), 104–105.
[7] “Body and Jewellery Spaces” is Neringa Poškutė-Jukumienė’s ongoing artistic research project exploring how jewelry operates as an extension of the body, not merely as adornment but as a spatial and relational medium. The project investigates how wearable forms engage with bodily memory, physical proximity, and social interaction – repositioning jewelry as a performative interface between self and environment.
[8] We use the term “archive” not in the institutional or material sense, but to denote a porous constellation of affective remnants – bodily impressions, soundscapes, intuitive actions, and poetic language – that collectively bear witness to the ephemeral encounters we experienced during the residency. This notion resonates with works such as Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains (Routledge, 2011), where she suggests that performance does not disappear but persists as residue, repetition, and re-enactment. In our case, the archive encompasses both the video piece and the lingering atmospheric, textual, and emotional traces it evokes.

 

About the author

Rosana Lukauskaitė holds a MA degree in Literature and is Lithuania based art critic and published author, writing both in Lithuanian and English. She has written around hundred articles and reviews about visual and stage arts. Her research interests include analyses of media, contemporary culture, artificial intelligence involvement in art, critique on consumerism, dichotomy of elite culture versus pop culture, as well as the nooks and crannies of postmodern culture in general.

You can find more of my reviews in English here: https://echogonewrong.com/author/rosanalu
And here: http://dance.lt/new/en/2022/10/05/choreographic-digs-dancing-through-the-layers-of-fact-and-fiction/
 


According to the curators and art critics, Neringa Poškutė-Jukumienė occupies a unique position in contemporary Lithuanian jewellery: she refuses to concentrate on creating objects for the body, let alone jewellery, focusing instead on the process itself. Neringa was one of few artists from the Baltic states participating in ‘SMCK On Reel’, the first international video festival inspired by jewellery and wearable art. So it's very interesting to further follow Neringa's artistic research journey.