J. (by Madli Maruste)

I approached Vilnius with a lot of questions. I tried to understand the multicultural past and present of the city that has been previously known by the Jewish people as Vilna and by the Polish as Wilno. I soon realised that I had too many questions within a very limited time and it is impossible to get answers to all of these during my one week stay in Vilnius. I decided to stop demanding answers, let go of control and let the city talk in it`s own way to me.

The next night I met with a person, someone who opened a door to Vilnius I did not know much about before. I realised talking to him that through one lifestory city`s history, language and identity can reveal themselves in a unique way. I decided to do my project about our interaction. For me the text I wrote and the photos I took represented the past that might still haunt the people after decades. The life narratives of a lot of people living in Vilnius were cut through so suddenly and aggressively during World War II, and the character of the city changed completely.

When someone`s roots are cut, then the routes in his life are disrupted as well. The city becomes a place to hide, but at the same time a place that haunts. The city is like a labyrinth of all the memories of people, who used to live there, but it is also a lost love letter to hopes and dreams that never materialised. When one ethnic group loses the places in the city that used to be the cornerstones of their identity, they might always feel homeless. Is it possible to fill this void in the soul? Can the city give them shelter and understanding, or is it hostile towards people who are the reminders of the layered history and sad secrets of a nation?

(text by Madli Maruste)

J. from Madli Maruste on Vimeo.

Urban Rhythms (by Andrei Karpeka)

It is about different rhythms which form the cityscape of Vilnius. Some of them are not recognizable, too routine to be noticed. Others interrupt them, they reflect the pace of people who animate the streets. It's the rhythms people are aware of, the ones which could make you stop and give up for some moment your initial plans. Those actions, which make the city's face.

Here's the documentatioin of the live video performance:

urban rhythms (documentation) from verabej on Vimeo.

Performed by Andrei Karpeka during LitPro Summer School on 17.08.2012 @ foos-in club, Vilnius

Bang Bang Are you sleeping?

Vera Z is having a Birthday today! Our greetings!

3:30 and the work is in progress. So we are tired and want to freak bree x)

Day 4

Movement & Numbers

    The idea of my project is to research Vilnuis as a place of movement and numbers. The movement can be found everywhere in the city (trains, people etc). The language can be also defined as a combination of numbers (that follow us everywhere hiding in things we do not pay a lot of attention to). 

    The method of my research is practical: I cross the city in order to feel its movement and look for numbers that reflect the city's identity. 

VSALF: Vilnius Street Animals Liberation Front

Day 1: Field work.

....

looking around in order to see beyound

snapshot of contrasting borderline between commuter town and 'new city'

Galvanized by a strong desire to explore Vilnius spaces through its variable surfaces, this project is aimed to discover alternatively (looking forward for sensitive perception) the representation of multi-cultural spatial relationships. It is an inevitable exploration of how do the surfaces change through different cultural zones and how can we investigate identity in these motions. Strolling around the city I've considered (with photography and mapping) a very strong borderlines between the 'new city' and the others regions.  Thus, I've decided to zone out all these regions on the map, in attempt to clear up the cultural differences between surfaces.

map of regions // livid - 'new city' / red - soviet time building ( malls, hotels, ent.)  / grey - 'Shanhai' region / orange - park & old city

The next checkpoint was to examine attentively the main roads, putting them out I've started shooting first video scales... The endeavor is a quest for revealing always not represented features, intangible sensations of everyday-life practices. 

snapshot of 'new city' surface

Alternative and Official Representations of the City

The group organized around the notion of tourism explores the overlap between the informal, self-organized  and the official, institutionalized representation of the city of Vilnius.  It set to create an engaging and entertaining social game based on information and data gathered in field-work research in the center of Vilnius.

LitPro Summer School - City, Language, Identity (10-17.08.2012, Vilnius)

For whom: students from the fields of the social sciences, urban studies, visual and cultural studies, architecture, photography, media studies, film studies, etc., with experience in research or creative work on questions similar to the ones the School poses.

Where: Vilnius, Lithuania.

When: August 10-17, 2012

The LitPro Summer School “City, Language, Identity” creates a context for the multidimensional research of the cultural and social geography of Vilnius to find out what is packed into the notion of the multicultural and multilingual character of the city. The major idea of the Summer School is to deliberately ground the practices of cultural identity building and exchange via language within the urban scale, and not within the scale of the nation-state, as has usually been done. The topics that will be covered by research groups during the week-long series of intensive workshop, lectures and field work include the following: “Tourism”, “Lost, Found and Shared Items: scenarios for interactions”, “The industry and the community of ‘Russian pop’ in Vilnius”, “Urban Texts”, “Urban Audio-visual Rhythms”.

Tutors: Jekaterina Lavrinec, Siarhei Liubimau, Ben Cope, Veronika Urbonaitė-Barkauskienė, Pavel Niakhayeu, Volha Salakheyeva. 

Experts: Rafal Siderski, Joanna Kinowska

Lecturer: Felix Ackermann

The main working language is English, although Lithuanian, Belarusian, Russian and Polish can be used in communication with tutors and media experts.

http://litpro.lt/en/litpro-summer-school-city-language-identity