2019 Archives - The Good Neighbour

Waldemarstraße

Posted on January 9, 2020April 25, 2020 by Monika Lipšic

A visit to Agnė Juodvalkytė’s studio in Waldemarstrasse, Berlin. Video and editing by Marijn Degenaar. Concept and direction by Monika Lipšic.

Agnė Juodvalkytė (b. Vilnius, 1987) is a visual artist currently living in Berlin and Vilnius. She graduated in (BA) Painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2010) and studied Visual Arts and Cinematography in Spain at the Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM, Facultad de Bellas Artes de Cuenca) (2009). Her recent shows include Core at the project space Aesthetik 01 in Berlin; Settling Dust at Si:said Gallery (Klaipėda, Lithuania); Archipelago at Reinbeckhallen with Goldrausch Künstlerinnen 2018 (Berlin).

Agnė Juodvalkytė uses textiles as a framework to understand culture, history and technology. She works with different materials, such as clothes, textiles, natural pigments, graphite dust, fabrics made by her grandmother, plants, and incorporates various mediums. Often presented in an anthropomorphic way, her works breathe their past into the present, becoming multidimensional artifacts extending not only into the space but also into time.

juodvalkytė.wordpress.com

What’s the role of a studio in your art and life? How much private is this space and this state of mind?

Agnė Juodvalkytė: Having a studio is essential to me. Without it I feel disoriented. My working process is very slow in a way, so I need my space all the time, everyday, even if just for a short moment. It is kind of a magic place. Sometimes it becomes a refuge where I disappear for two weeks, but then I also love to have guests over there. It is refreshing to have a change of routines and the studio is the place where I can do that.

I share my studio with other artists from Sweden, New York and France. We all have different ways of working but it kind of blends together into a good atmosphere.

In your work every detail resembles the whole. As if every moment in a painting similar to a drop of paint on the floor of the studio, is a part of the bigger canvas. It creates a feeling of a certain entity. It seems like you found your way of being and painting. When do you think this happened and how do you perceive it yourself?

AJ: I guess I am still trying to find this. On the other hand, it is true that there was a certain period of time when I had put a lot of hours and effort without really thinking about it, just trusting my feeling and slowly going forward through the process of working a lot. After I came to Berlin it took me few years to slowly find my ways of doing things.

You read a lot and visit many shows and events in Berlin. How did you decide to move here and how is this city affecting your creative routines? How do you feel part of the Berlin art space?

AJ: Berlin has so many artists who want to be seen and at the same time just to have fun. I came here in 2011 and it had changed so much since then. I am still learning to navigate the complicated art waters. I don‘t belong to any institutional place, which is a freedom and a hard work at the same time.

It is so easy to get lost in just being busy and not doing much of a creative work. So I am learning to take time and step back sometimes. Vilnius is a good place for me to reflect on what I did and what I want. I couldn’t really say, that I moved to Berlin because I also still live in Vilnius, I spend time being in Austria, in art residencies and moving around.

Being in Berlin gives a chance to work with people that I really admire. My two recent solo exhibitions happened in a project space called Aesthetik 01, run by Kristina Nagel, who is one of these people. Preparing exhibitions together with her was very organic and intuitive, which I really love a lot. Few years ago, in 2017, I had a great experience working with Gruppe Magazine (Fritz Schiffers, Nele Ruckelshausen, Tim Heyduck and Aaron Kalitzki). It is a wonderful project that connects and chronicles young creative underground in Berlin.

Community is important to me. It’s hard for any creative person without it, I think. When one feels heard and understood in their creative surrounding, things tend to have a different speed and energy.

Blue Carbon, Intertidal

Posted on September 28, 2019April 22, 2020 by Monika Lipšic

Blue Carbon, Intertidal is an interstitial section of Hydrangea. Written by Holly Childs. Music by J. G. Biberkopf. Voiced by Elif Ozbay. Film by Holly Childs

Co-produced by The Good Neighbour and Runway Journal. Originally commissioned by Runway Journal for Issue 39 Oceans.

The Good Neighbour: I got a familiar feeling from watching this work. The voice seems to channel many meanings from subjective line to computerised self to poetic voice, and the images are very global, pointing to different parts of the planet. How did it all come together as a piece?

Holly Childs: I recently learned that a step-cousin who I’ve never met is an expert in “blue carbon”, the name for underwater and coastal ocean ecosystems that hold carbon. This piqued my interest, and after researching coastal ocean ecosystems, I came to think of how much time I spend in intertidal zones, the areas that are underwater at high tide, and dry land at low tide, and to contemplate what records I had taken of these beach-and-other locations. All footage used in Blue Carbon, Intertidal was shot over a 3 year period in which I lived in London, Naarm (Melbourne), Auckland and Moscow.

In the summer in Auckland, and my routine was that I would work every day and when it was close to high tide, I walked or jogged (depending on how hot the day was) to beaches on Waitemata Harbour to swim. Each day, high tide occurred approximately 50 minutes later than the previous day creating a stretchy rhythm across weeks. I found no documentation of water from this period.

The voice, several people have mistaken for a computerised system voice, is actually Elif Özbay. The text, and the work in general, purposely invites various projections and interpretations.

TGN: The image of an Ocean as an entity and Ocean politics are continuously reverberating in today’s global ecological thought (resulting from Anthropocene effects). What qualities of the ocean (as an idea, image, metaphor?) could you describe as inspiring and connecting to you?

HC: I grew up in proximity to the ocean, took it for granted and only later moved to landlocked regions where I experienced strange effects. In Moscow, every night I dreamt of beaches, and in the Netherlands, surrounded by water in every conceivable way, but with none hitting land in the satisfying beachy way I knew from home, for months I stopped dreaming. Blue Carbon, Intertidal is a poem, longer than the excerpt used in this video, that iterates like tides. Awareness that the edges will always change, iterating almost imperceptibly over a scale of days, while shifting dramatically over larger timescales.

Some years ago, I stayed up a hill, overlooking a zone that was anecdotally and socially projected to be underwater in the near future due to the effects of climate change. It was claimed that the local government was aware of this impending reality, but didn’t or couldn’t let its residents know, as to do so would render their pre-sunk properties worthless, and void residents’ insurance policies. Climate change creates a range of catch-22s, direct and indirect.

TGN: Hydrangea is a long term project you’ve been working on together with J. G. Biberkopf. What is at the core of Hydrangea, what kind of tools and thinking?

HC: In a performance context, Blue Carbon, Intertidal is an interstitial section connecting Hydrangea I to Hydrangea II, both sound works for performance in greenhouses. A spray of salt between the emotion of Hydrangea I and the lost forest of Hydrangea II. The nature of the project is essentially a mystery, and we are happy to keep it that way for the moment.

Holly Childs is an Australian writer and artist. Her most recent work, an evolving performance series for greenhouses made with J. G. Biberkopf, is Hydrangea, a myth about myths, in which every flower is a story in a forest of never-ending branching narratives. Other recent works include writing for Angela Goh’s Uncanny Valley Girl, and the co-creation of Patternist, an augmented reality sci-fi urban exploration game. She is the author of two novels: Danklands (Arcadia Missa) and No Limit (Hologram). Her third novel Greenhouse Parking will be published in 2020.

J. G. Biberkopf is an artist based in-between Amsterdam and Vilnius. They work within the fields of sound, documentary, performance, and installation. Their recent solo work and collaborations predominantly work to deconstruct the political imaginaries effective in the Western world. In previous work, they have focused on aural memes, while their ‘Ecologies’ album series explored initiating ecological discourse in the realm of experimental electronic music.

Feedback

Posted on June 5, 2019April 22, 2020 by Monika Lipšic

Saulius, or Sal as his friends from London called him, was a Dj, a passionate vinyl collector aswell as one of the creative minds behind the last.fm internet radio project in its early beginnings. He was a universal restless character, a rebel, an anti-system, always part of collaborations and multiple creative projects, organizing parties and events, listening to music and gathering people. Born as Saulius Čemolonskas in 1964 in Kaunas, he escaped Soviet Lithuania with forged documents in 1989 and spent most of his life in London. Countless hours of his archive of music, sound and videos recorded on VHS, DV and 8mm cassettes encapsulates Saulius’ rebellious character, his playfulness and creativity aswell as his surroundings from times of turmoil and revolt in 1980’s Lithuania to the late 90’s London music scene to recent times and his own private past.

In this video, filmmaker Simona Žemaitytė who had known Saulius for almost a decade, uses his archive material to depict the story which could be called a universal human quest to escape or an attempt against the system (any, really). The longer we look beyond the ‘patina’ of time through the VHS and the DV (bringing images of long lost cities, both Kaunas and London) the more we understand that perhaps Sal was one of such persons that each of us had known once, anywhere, anytime in our lives. Saulius had passed away in 2017. His ashes are in his friend’s music studio in London.

Simona Žemaitytė (b. 1984) is a Lithuanian artist and filmmaker, living and working in London and Vilnius. It took Simona almost five years to find VHS tapes that Sal occasionally mentioned in their conversations after giving her a copy of his entire archive. She had filmed Sal performing with Terry Burrows and Laure Prouvost among others and made few projects based on his biography. She is currently editing a full feature on Sal and his life.

Simona’s own work was previously awarded at 15th Tallinn Print Triennial, also nominated at Sheffield Documentary film Festival. Previous exhibitions and shows include Kasa Gallery, Galata Perform (Istanbul); BAFTA, RichMix (London), CAC (Vilnius) and others.

Unreality of reality of Jurgis Baltrušaitis

Posted on February 27, 2019May 17, 2019 by Monika Lipšic

‘It was a mysterious person. Everything he wanted to say he wrote in his books’ wrote art historian Jean-Francois Chevrier in his biography about Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1903-1988), art historian and art critic, a founder of comparative art research. The video invites to a journey with art historian Odeta Žukauskienė through the books of Jurgis Baltrušaitis and main topics of his research – Medieval decoration, imaginary forms, anamorphoses, aberrations and irregular perspectives. It was important for Baltrušaitis to find common mechanisms of fantasy or imagination that float from one culture to another by acquiring different forms. Baltrušaitis brought innovation to art research, by publishing books on art from the Caucasus, the interaction between Eastern and Western art during the Middle Ages, the imagery of fantasy, distorted perspectives, and enigmatic vision. His work received wide recognition: his books, written in French, were awarded prizes, and translated into Italian, Spanish, English, Romanian, Japanese and other languages.

Ieva Kotryna Skirmantaitė (b. 1994) is a video artist interested in alternative documentary forms in theory and in practice. By capturing and connecting real events, other people’s practices, discussions, sounds and bits from everyday life, she has found a way to create an imaginary path and to reveal invisible excitements and anxieties. She explores how different technical qualities of the digital image act as separate memory systems and represent different contemporary political and economical values.

Akvilė Kabašinskaitė (b. 1990) is a professional film researcher working in film production in parallel. She lives and works in Paris. Previously she had studied Culture Mediation in Sorbonne Paris 3 and wrote her masters on the research for documentaries. Currently she is doing an MA thesis about the construction of a documentary film.

Jurgis Baltrušaitis spent most of his life in Paris and wrote in French, though he never lectured there. Born in Moscow, a son to a Lithuanian diplomat and writer, Juozas Baltrušaitis studied in Sorbonne, lectured in Kaunas and Warburg Institute London. After WWII he delivered lectures in New York University, Yale University, Harvard University and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Flight Mode

Posted on February 28, 2018September 15, 2019 by mindaugas

The narrator of Flight Mode navigates between private, public and virtual spaces, dividing her attention between action and thought, while contemplating the role of individualism and complex asymmetries among individuals and the society.

‘I was thinking about subjectivity. And how, regardless of how embarrassing it can be, especially when exercised in an intellectual context, how almost always, almost inevitably, it speaks some kind of truth. It expresses a state of mind that at least one person is in. And if one person is in that state of mind, perhaps it would be safe to say, that the community that person belongs to is, possibly, in a similar state of mind. It’s as if the society itself is internalized and then externalized again, through an individual.’ – excerpt from the video.

This video carefully and subtly pictures this minute of the truth – a slow transient moment from a full body indecision and insecurity, to a small but bright change of the thought and the rising of determination. By exercising the subjectivity, this work speaks about larger symptoms of the individualistic society and its affirmative effects on depressive experiences. The work by Daiva Tubutytė shines a light on a short-lived individual experience as part of a bigger picture of the society.

Daiva Tubutytė (b. 1986) is a visual artist based in Berlin. She works with text, moving image and sound. Recent presentations include Wavelenght series at Toronto International Film festival, Kreuzberg Pavillon and Ashley Berlin. Daiva is a graduate of the graphic design departments of Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2012) and Vilnius Academy of Arts (2009) and a nominee for the 2013 Berlin Art Prize.