ODE TO TEACHERS: History as Private Narratives, Lives beyond Normativity, the Unclassifiable, the Ambiguous, the Borderline and Borderless, Overwhelming Existences, and Intimate Experiences

Abstract

The result of this Ph.D. research is a book that gives space to fields of knowledge ordinarily disregarded by academic historiography and by the sciences – fields that, nevertheless, profoundly shape our relation to the past. It is imagined as a conversation with her teachers, most of whom Palekaitė had to find herself, none of whom the education system introduced her to, a large majority of whom she encountered only through text, film, or artwork, half of whom were dead before she was born. The thesis unfolds through several angles. One is dedicated to cosmological thinking - a form of knowledge rooted in complexity and holism, a practice that crosses disciplines and resists fragmentation. Here, ancient and contemporary ‘cosmologers’ are brought into dialogue, forming a conceptual backbone of the work and surfacing throughout the text. Another thread considers history under pressure - how it is written into the present under extreme conditions such as war, occupation, genocide, and systemic racism, and how does memory resist erasure. Palekaitė also turns to private experience, proposing the bedroom as a space of intimacy, sexuality, illness, dreams, fears, and creativity – and therefore as a site where history is being written. The research moves through liminal existences - bodies that do not conform to prescribed categories and that find themselves in states of transition, transformation, or transgression. Finally, dreams are approached as epistemological sites of agency - zones where the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, can meet. The thesis is inseparable from Palekaitė’s artistic practice – from exhibitions, performances, and films developed alongside and through the research. The writing itself is an artistic practice: composed in a poetic-spoken modality, it evokes the rhythm of conversation, slows the breath of the reader, and resists categorisation. It attempts to hold questions that stretch over time, take root in memory, dwell within or beside our bodies, and return in dreams – suggesting that they, too, are forms of historical knowledge.