Replenishing yourself with arts

Dr. Gražina Bielousova is a Lithuanian researcher and public scholar working at the intersections of race, religion, and gender in Eastern Europe. She defended her PhD at Duke University (North Carolina, USA) and currently resides in London, where she teaches at University College London’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. When she is not researching how Eastern Europe is seen through Western eyes or how leftist feminists in Eastern Europe imagine a better society, she can be found roaming the museums, reading novels, and playing with her cat.

In the interview for The Good Neighbour Gražina reflects on the role that the arts play into her self-reflective modalities and the need to experience culture as a means to discover new ways of understanding and experiencing life. Gražina says that when she encounters a powerful artwork, it replenishes her and opens new doors of perception, as if building an inner emotional architecture, providing a source of awe and restorative space.

Produced by The Good Neighbour
Questions: Justė Kostikovaitė
Music by Koloah, album “Serenity”
Filmed by Elena Reimerytė
Text by Marija Sinkevičiūtė

Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Partners: UK Lithuanian Youth Association,
the British-Lithuanian Society

On inspirations: images from Life, Web and Film

Deividas Vytautas (b. 1996) is a Lithuanian filmmaker and visual artist based between London, Vilnius and Berlin. Vytautas graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2022. His multidisciplinary practice spanning moving image, performance, installation and print explores themes of freedom, transgression, youth culture and spirituality, engaging with the contemporary condition through a process of layering, recontextualizing and sampling elements of mass media, religion and pop culture.

In the interview for The Good Neighbour Deividas Vytautas talks about what drives his practice, allowing himself to lean into recurring topics such as religious motives, elements of rave culture, sexuality, and reflects on intense experiences that influenced him. In his recent solo show at Meno Parkas Gallery in Kaunas, Lithuania which took place in September 2023 Deividas Vytautas presented a performance-based installation “Collective Healing Youth Club (ACT I)”. It was the inaugural performance of the expansive “Collective Healing Youth Club” project. “Collective Healing Youth Club” (CHYC) stands as an expansive, multidisciplinary performance-based initiative delving into healing through sensory imagery and embodied ritualistic experiences. Rooted in the thematic exploration initiated by the artists earlier film “filled up, torn open” (2022), the project evolves to centre on the collective investigation of the intersection between spiritual and hedonistic environments through live performance. This exploration unfolds within spaces like the rave and the church — environments charged with a powerful transgressive and transcendental energy.

Produced by The Good Neighbour
Questions: Justė Kostikovaitė
Filmed by Elena Reimerytė
Text by Marija Sinkevičiūtė
Music: NataTeva – LASKA
Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture Partners: UK Lithuanian Youth Association, the British-Lithuanian Society

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