Michał Siarek (Poland)
Inner Light
(Tuesday, Sept. 12, 5:30 PM. Thomas Mann Museum stairway, Skruzdynės St. 17)
Over the last few years I was working in a little community on the Barents coast in Norway. Gamvik is a remote fishing village with about 200 inhabitants. I was invited to become a local photographer for the village, bygdefotograf in Norwegian, on behalf of the local museum. Later I was offered a position to look after a local lighthouse, Slettnes, the northernmost lighthouse on the mainland.
It is a strange experience for a photographer to man a lighthouse. This experience has led me directly to working with light and to conceptualising light in my ongoing works. And because of that, at some point I was invited to work on an exhibition about lighthouses with the Nordkapp Museum, because 2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the invention of the Fresnel lens, which is the basis of the modern lighthouse. There is a lot of meaning attached to this, because Fresnel’s improvement in marine safety pretty much kickstarted modern global trade, while the basis for his work has proven the wave theory of light.
I landed in Nida because the Lithuanian Association of Photographers launched an open call for a locally based and locally involved project that would be conducted in Nida. While I was looking the place up, I noticed that Nida’s lighthouse is quite central to the premises and it was a perfect link, because I was looking for a different take on lighthouses and conceptual light, but away from Gamvik for a while. Moving out of Norway towards different lighthouses has opened different dialogues.
Anton Lukoszevieze (Lithuania / United Kingdom)
Memory Maps
chromogenic drawings, 50 x 60 cm, 2022
(Tuesday, Sept. 12, 6:00 PM. Curonian Spit History Museum, Pamario St. 53)
‘The memories are still there, hidden in the grey tangle of the brain, in the damp bed of sand deposited on the bottom of the stream of thought.’
Italo Calvino, Memories of a Battle
These images are memory maps of the land where my ancestors originated from in Suvalkija, Lithuania. I can trace my father’s Lithuanian family back to the middle of the 19th century. My grandfather was born in 1896 in Penkinių dvaras north of the town of Pajevonys. I have never been there. In 1908 my family emigrated to Great Britain, and the dvaras does not exist anymore, destroyed by the wars of the 20th century. My memories of their homeland are imagined.
These cameraless colour “photographs”, or clichè-verre photo drawings on Fuji crystal archive paper are made with different coloured light passing through multiple transparent and etched surfaces. Each image is unique and improvised quickly in real time, in complete darkness. Variables of chemical developer strength and temperature also modulate the different colour intensities.
Do memories have colour or perspective? Maps have signs, shapes, lines and 2 dimensional contours to illustrate the geographic identity of a place, a quasi-aerial view to recreate the reality of a location, which is not the same as the human perspective on the ground. My father described to me how my grandfather remembered in the wintertime sledging down a small hill next to a lake by the dvaras. This is the only memory trace I have of my family in Lithuania. It is fixed in my mind: snow, sky, water, land.
Anton Lukoszevieze (born 1965) is a British-Lithuanian musician and interdisciplinary artist. He is the founder and director of the group Apartment House, who are renowned for their performances and recordings of experimental and avant-garde music. His work has been shown at Tate Modern, CAC Vilnius, Prospektas Gallery Vilnius, Kaunas Biennial, Kettle's Yard Cambridge, ICA London and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid. He lives and works in Vilnius.
Research by
Svetlana Batura (Lithuania)
Vanished Story
(Tuesday, Sept. 12, 7:00 PM. Mizgiriai Artist Residency, Pamario St. 20)
“A fairly large-scale archive, from WWII throughout the whole Soviet period was hidden in one of the wooden apartment houses in Žaliakalnis, Kaunas. As it often happens after a person’s death the relatives were tidying the home, preparing it for sale. In a wardrobe among the personal belongings of the deceased they found a bag. They looked, and found that the photographs were not of their relatives and did not intend to preserve them…”
The nameless photograph archive, consisting of many different format photographs, negatives, glass plates and contact prints was miraculously preserved and completely accidentally ended up in the hands of Svetlana Batura, and after a few years of research gained form and meaning.
The details of this work with archival materials and a path of research reminiscent of a detective story will be revealed by research of the interwar-period Giedraičiai archive. How did a nameless archive in a cellophane bag unexpectedly end up in the hands of a researcher and lead her to such significant events as President Smetona’s escape from Lithuania, or the beginning of the creative path of Jonas and Adolfas Mekas? A wonderful colour picture of the intelligentsia of the period revealed itself upon subtly touching the strings of the conductors of history of the period.
The archive researcher asks questions about the significance and meaning of inheritance, revealing aspects behind the scenes of research, and discusses different attitudes towards the traces left by history and the importance of photography in that process.
