Moose Island by Eglė Vertelkaitė as a Map Annihilating and Preserving National Identity

Abstract

Moose Island, a project by Eglė Vertelkaitė, was presented at the Vilnius gallery Kairė–dešinė in the autumn of 2023. It is based on soviet-era maps of Lithuania used at work by the artist’s father, an engineer-hydrotechnologist. The artist scanned, photographed, and painted over these maps with black ink, attempting to erase imposed foreign place names and reveal the authentic ones. She also documented the process in film and photographed fragments of maps, thus exposing hidden “landscapes.” Another film, Glosos, was assembled from her father’s archive of family photographs. It was shown alongside images of crosswords that her father used to create and a land ownership document issued to the artist’s grandfather for his participation in the Lithuanian war of independence in 1919–2020. Together, these objects, photographs, archival documents, and maps form a narrative about the occupation of Lithuania and attempts to preserve national identity through the reiteration of the memory of places. The project consists of three parts: All of Lithuania. Absoluted; 44 Districts. Laid Out, and Negatives in Positives.

The use of transformed maps invites a critical reflection on philosophical models of opposing power that associate domination with space (or territory) and subjugation with time (or trajectory). In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that strategists occupy territory and inscribe utopian projections onto it without regard for local specificity, whereas tactics, without occupying space, move along trajectories that are even illegible to those who enact them. These tactical bodies, writing their vanishing and illegible texts while filling places with legends, memories, and dreams, oppose power that cannot be overthrown.

The article draws on the dialectics of territory and place, the language of strategists and tactics, and the memories preserved in photographs and myths in order to analyse Moose Island by Vertelkaitė as a model of resistance to totalitarian power. Through her interventions, the artist establishes a distance between a conventional map and an artwork as a multi-layered experience triggering historical imagination. She reveals the changed meaning of land as a territory occupied by the Soviet Union and the quiet language of lived and remembered places as a form of resistance. The real Moose Island, already present even in soviet maps, acquires a symbolic dimension related to myth and Baltic identity, signalling hope that even under occupation the restoration of national identity remained possible.