IUS SANGUINIS / IUS DOMICILII

I sing the Lithuanian national anthem without an accent. The Norwegian one, I sing with an accent that tells everyone I arrived a few years ago. Norway took me in through ius domicilii, the right of residence. Lithuania erased me — not by choice, but because its law forbids dual citizenship.

This project doesn't try to resolve that. It gives it form, through play rather than argument: singing a childhood song, painting with muddy fingers instead of a brush, scratching letters into soil the way a child carves initials into a tree — a primitive I was here. An abstract painting I made from feeling alone, with no plan, still ended up dominated by the colours of a passport, burgundy and coral red. I hadn't been thinking about passports. The body knew before I had words for it.

Soil from my garden in Oslo and from the garden I once owned in Vilnius becomes paint — not a symbol of home, but home itself. Bread and salt from a childhood where both were dessert. An old Lithuanian linen cloth, embroidered with both national anthems in Norwegian thread. A sound piece where I sing both anthems at once, until they merge.

Which am I more of, when neither place can answer fully alone?