Emilija Filipenkovaitė (Lithuania)
Gyvenamieji / Dwelling (living)

This documentary/experimental film explores how the Lithuanian SSR’s architectural and ideological systems shaped everyday life – particularly in residential districts where beauty services, functionality, and state control intersected. The work reflects on how institutional power influenced not only aesthetic perception and self-representation, but also people’s ability to imagine alternative forms of community.

The film blends archival material from Tarybų Lietuva, a Soviet-era newsreel, with footage shot by the artist in Vilnius’ residential neighborhoods in 2020. It traces how ideological structures persist in space – through shortcuts, facades, ground-floor beauty salons – and how inherited ideas of efficiency, visibility, and beauty continue to shape collective experience.

Medium: Archival video (original soundtrack), contemporary video, field recording.

Emilija Filipenkovaitė is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, sculpture, and sound. Her practice explores how ideology, memory, and digital culture shape aesthetic choices in everyday life. She studied Photography and Media Art at Vilnius Academy of Arts before transferring to the Sculpture Department, where she embraced a more experimental, transdisciplinary approach.

Her work often blends archival research, performance, and sonic elements. Projects like Tinder Activist examine the politics of digital intimacy; Masterclass: The World of Emoji subverts musical notation systems and authorship; and Dwelling (Living) explores how institutional power shaped the domestic aesthetics of the Lithuanian SSR.

Emilija is particularly drawn to spaces and gestures that emerge outside institutional art structures – forms of making embedded in daily life. Her recent research investigates inherited interiors, aesthetic adaptation under constraint, and the intersection of taste, class, and economy. Photography remains a core tool for both documenting and intervening in these narratives.

Her practice reflects a sustained interest in how visual languages are shaped by social structures – and how they can be reinterpreted, reclaimed, or subverted through art.