Month: December 2021

The Mind is a Home

Posted on by Monika Lipšic
The Good Neighbour asked Gintė Regina to produce a video about herself, a self-referential artist’s studio visit where she examines her work and the inspirations behind it. Gintė invited Monika Baranauskaite to ask her some questions, in a direct inversion of their roles in Gintė’s film Monika in September (2018), in which Monika is the subject and Gintė — the voice behind the camera. In Gintė’s answers we find clues as to what draws the viewers into her lyrical, autobiographically flavoured films. Is it the painfully recognisable yet playful authenticity, or certain non-dogmatic insertions that challenge the suspension of disbelief within Gintė Regina’s films, reminding us of the artist at work and allowing us to keep a certain distance from the protagonists?
The video, titled “The Mind is A Home”, reflects Gintė’s process by playing with layers of staging and reality. It is a document of her filmography so far, an exploration of the themes in her work, and a self-reflexive positioning of the artist inside her practice, culminating in a dance scene and blurring the boundaries between art and life. For Gintė, by being an artist “in the broadest sense of the word”, you “create a world for your mind to inhabit — a place that’s always there and that you never have to leave”. This, for a maker whose life and practice are marked by a sense of constant movement, is a most precious possession.

Gintė Regina is a Lithuanian filmmaker working in-between artist film and narrative fiction. Her short films have been screened in leading cinemas and arts venues around the UK, including British Film Institute (Future Film Presents SCENE) and Whitechapel Gallery (Selected VII) in London. She has had two solo exhibitions, in 2018 at GAO, London, where Monika in September had its premiere, and in 2020 at CCA Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Her work was first shown in Lithuania in 2021, at Galerija 101 in Kaunas and as part of Videograms festival in Vilnius. Ginte is currently based between London and Vilnius.

Monika Baranauskaitė is a writer for stage and a voice actor. Her most recent projects as writer include the performance “Žiūredama viena į Kitą” (“Gazing at One Another”), shown in November 2021 at CAC in Vilnius, and “Eco Farm”, a comedic play that will premiere in 2022.

ON INSULA

Posted on by Monika Lipšic

ON INSULA – a conversation between contemporary dancer Dovydas Strimaitis and artist & choreographer Maarja Tõnisson in Marseille.

Insula aims to dive into organic relations of space within and between bodies, where they meet complex identities, natures, movements, clothes and sounds. Transfiguring strangers are constantly defaced or obscured in dance. The space becomes a field of attention and the audience takes an active part in landscape dramaturgy. The bodies that we inhabit, made of seventy percent water, unstable materials and containers, are in constant shift. The fictional and natural merge into affective scenes to challenge the sense of physicality, belonging, the other and intimacy.

Interview setting: September 2020 Dovydas Strimaitis and Maarja Tõnisson meet in Marseille IRL after a few zoom sessions and start working together, testing the borders of their bodies and their work, they start forming their own island, their insula (s). In this conversation you will hear reflections about how does it feel to work together in an unfamiliar setting of pandemic-ridden city of Marseille, which in 2020 commemorates 300 years since the deadly bubonic plague.

Video edit: E/A/Smith

Music: Maarja Nuut & Ruum, a duo will present the work “World Inverted”(LP)
 Curated by Justė Kostikovaitė, Merilin Talumaa, Maija Rudovska

Interview was conducted by Ryan Galer and Ilze Aulmane

 Dovydas Strimaitis is a Lithuanian contemporary dancer, living and working in Marseille. He has been part of Jitti Chompee’s “18 monkeys dance theater” in Thailand, participated in the creation process in Gothenburg Opera’s Dance Company with choreographer Marina Mascarell, and performed in the restaging of Jan Martens’s “Pretty Perfect”. Since 2019, Dovydas has been dancing in Le Ballet National de Marseille, under the direction of La Horde, where he works with choreographers Alessandro Sciarroni, Lucinda Childs, Lasseindra Ninja and Tânia Carvalho.

 Maarja Tõnisson is an artist and choreographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. In her work, she mainly explores physicality and materiality through choreography. She has created four solo works: bodySHIFTbody (produced by STL, nominated for the Estonian dance award, 2015); bodyBUILDINGbody (commissioned by Tallinn Architecture Biennale, 2015); bodyIMAGEbody (group exhibition “(In)visible dreams and streams”, curated by Maija Rudovska, CAC, 2016)) and bodyWORKbody (at group exhibition “Museum Choreography” curated by Hanna Liis Kont, Tartu Art Museum, 2017). She is also part of a performance collective Olmeulmad.