Artist-in-Residency November 2017
Šilainia-Project

Šilainiai Project is a socially engaged artist-led initiative started up in 2016 by artist/curator Evelina Simkute aiming to open up platforms and activities in the Soviet-built neighbourhood of Šilainia, Kaunas in Lithuania that invite a sharing of experiences, photographic archives, stories – bringing residents together in an organic web of engagement and new actions – involving schools, library, local and guest artists and residents – an evolving arts project.

Šilainiai is a suburb of the Lithuanian city of Kaunas built by the Soviet Republic in the 1980s. A local architect was commissioned to design a new socially cohesive neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city centre in which residents with a diverse variety of professions and jobs would come to live, work and bring up their families. Lithuania entangled in the complex historical movements of the region, of USSR, of WWII became once again independent in 1991.

The residency was an invite to work in and respond to the neighbourhood and this offered a choreographic work-site to continue exploring body and place in relation to themes of (dis) orientation and presence. I proposed to develop ‘rhythmic scores’ and ‘quiet positionings’ as choreographic objects in different sites of the neighbourhood: activating surfaces, tilting the architectural grid and exploring a co-presence with material textures, objects and features of each site. And yet as I spent time absorbing, listening and lingering, I became weighed down and stilled – still and heavy and quiet as concrete. Šilainiai, seemed a place of weight – historical, architectural, material.

Lightness resided in my encounters with people.

A book-document STILLED: tilt/linger/concrete was produced – a series of folded pages containing photographic images, scores, drawings and texts. Please see books for more details.