“Pakui Hardware” representing Lithuania in Venice – about MTRožanskaitė and public inflammation | Culture

15min asked how Neringa Černiauskaita and Ugnius Gelguda are managing to represent Lithuania, what is the main idea of ​​their project. Correspondence with the artists took place before the opening of the pavilion on April 20.

– You are currently in Venice. How are you managing the exposure? When do you plan to finish the work? Where are you staying??

– Right now, we are writing from the exhibition space of the pavilion – the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin church, where the whole team is buzzing. We have been installing for the fourth week already, several groups “growing” different elements of the installation have changed. Since this year the pavilion is located in the space of the baroque heritage, we had to turn our heads quite a bit as to how we might create the environment without touching the walls and ceiling. Therefore, the architect duo Isora x Lozuraitytė Studio created a principle of architecture in architecture, which was implemented by a whole group of specialists. There are only a few days left to set up the pavilion, since the first viewers, art specialists will be able to visit it from next Tuesday, and from April 20. the pavilion will also be open to the general public.

– What do you sew with?how do you get along?riate in preparation for the exhibition?

– Since Lithuania is one of the countries that does not have a permanent pavilion space, every year the organizers of both the art and architecture biennale have to explore the entire city in search of an environment suitable for a specific idea. Since this installation requires a solid plan space and is quite substantial, the choice was further limited. Only thanks to the diplomatic skills of the commissioner of the pavilion, Arūnas Gelūnas, it was possible to reconcile the questions and challenges of this impressive church with the curia that governs it. From our first visit, we were all struck by its meditativeness and a certain sense of abandonment, as this church has been closed to visitors for more than ten years.

At the same time, Venice itself, with its maze of canals and local peculiarities in the coordination of works, is one big challenge facing the organizers of all pavilions. We learned a lot, and without the dedicated museum team, we certainly would not have been able to overcome all the Venetian “floods”.

– Your exhibition is important forthe concept of combustion revealsia systemic economic and social injustices. What are the wrongs?

– They are really diverse, but first of all it would be worthwhile to discover the primary source of that damage, one of the most important of which is the history of colonial exploitation of natural resources and certain groups of people. A story that continues to this day with its consequences and new forms of colonization. The foundations for such an exploitative approach were laid by the Western school of thought, which artificially separated man from nature and elevated one race or civilization above others. This made it easier to exploit what was considered “other”. Thus, historically created asymmetric and hierarchical structures continue to create social, economic and ecological injustices and problems. Although the damage may have been done several decades or even centuries ago, in human bodies as living archives those wrongs are recorded and transmitted from generation to generation. And then it manifests itself in one or another form of inflammation.

– Why was the motive of inflammation important to you?

– For some time now, in our work, we have been exploring the relationship between the transformations of human bodies and modern medicine, including it in more flexible – economic or social contexts. Therefore, the concept of inflammation naturally entered the general field of our research. A couple of years ago, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s book Flaming: The Anatomy of Injustice and Deep Medicine came into my hands, which evocatively combines not only the human and planetary scales, but also shows how at first glance distant things – historical colonialism, the microbiome or endangered species – are intimately connected. animal and plant species. Since in several previous projects we also sought to interrogate those artificially drawn boundaries between what is alive and what is dead, human and natural, we were very close to these authors’ criticism of Western cosmology as a divisive and thus easier conquering approach. Thus, through the biological process – inflammation – we can talk regarding both historical and present-day or near-future problems and dangers.

– How is it related to MTRožanskaitė’s work?

– MTRožanskaitė paid a lot of attention to the depiction of the human body in the medical system in part of her work. Often using fragmentation and the coldness of medical equipment, she conveyed the systematic transformation of personalities into anonymous particles. So by depicting scenes from hospitals or medical procedures, she seemed to silently criticize the wider political system and technology itself. The inclusion of her works also helps to talk regarding the injustices in this region as well, caused by a country that has not abandoned its imperialist plans so far. At the same time, together with the curators, we included several of the artist’s more abstract works, in which she depicts cosmic bodies and landscapes, in the exhibition of the pavilion. In this way, we connect human and cosmic bodies through the language of painting.

– What do you think, is there any hope of getting out of humanity by killing it?ios fevers?

– If we name the correct diagnosis. And it leads to those, already mentioned, artificial differences between one’s own and another, man and nature, living and dead, which were created by those who laid the foundations for the outbreak of that fever. Therefore, in the pavilion, we will invite the audience not only to experience the ignition process, but through it to look for a different access to the environment and oneself. Approaches in which a short-sighted way of exploiting resources or others would turn into a broader and time-spanning awareness of interconnectedness and the consequences of actions.