Nida Art Colony per la Lituania

Per la Lituania sarà il collettivo Nida Art Colony

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Nida Art Colony will be representing Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. This time the Colony will is going to present Sun and Sea, an opera-performance by Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte, and Rugile Barzdžiukaite.

Initially, the creation of Sun and Sea was developed during the residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2016. At the end of the residency, the project was presented as a micro-opera version at Palermo gallery in Stuttgart. In the autumn of 2017, it was presented at the National Gallery of Arts in Vilnius and this year the artists were awarded with Borisas Dauguvietis Earring for innovation and originality.

Sun & Sea’s setting is a makeshift beach area, set up indoors to resemble as closely as possible a real-life, crowded beach: like a counter-monumental, anti-baroque theatre.

Contemporary society, a major character in the performance, is embodied by a number of performers in their bathing suits, lying on the ground looking up, while the audience looks down at them from above. In an apparent show of frivolity and laziness, the seaside sets the stage for the ominous topics addressed by the songs with the same nonchalance: complex subjects unfold easily, attractively. Like putting on sunglasses to witness a star dying.

In her recent book, Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway suggests that the worst position to take in what she calls ‘a time of trouble’, plagued as it is by extinction and climate change and so much else besides, is that of ‘depressed nihilism’: in the face of overbearing complexity, of an ocean of headlines, a repetition of alarmist clichés, the mind retreats, folds in, becomes incapable of conceiving of possible action, or of believing in the consequentiality of one’s individual life, or active life.

Haraway would say: “It matters what worlds world worlds”. This phrase, seemingly so esoteric, means simple things: it is time for the sciences to recognise the arts and humanities, and for the arts and humanities to do the same back. Only through collaboration and exchange, through new imaginaries and new forms are we perhaps likely to set the stage for more interspecies and ecological re-thinks of this fragile planet. It is key, Haraway argues, for worlds once apart (science and humanities, social sciences and geology… the list goes on) to reconnect.

The authors of opera-performance Sun and Sea are Rugile Barzdžiukaite, Vaiva Grainyte, and Lina Lapelyte

The curator Dr Lucia Pietroiusti (London) is the Public Programmes Curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London.

The commissioner of the pavillon Prof Jean-Baptiste Joly (Stuttgart) is the Founder and Artistic Director of Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Producer Dr Rasa Antanavičiūtė (Vilnius) is the Executive Director of VAA Nida Art Colony.