video installation (00:48:25)
2024
first exhibited at the inthecloset, vilnius (lt) in the group show I hope this email finds you well
To investigate the Rail Baltica project, we created a project group. Baltic Lines. For this, we wrote a project.
To write a project means to frame, to bend, to mould, to take clay into your hands, and make a piece that eventually lands on the drying shelf. Sometimes the project clay shelf gets crowded, and some of it might end up in the clay reuse bin, while some may go in the trash. Too dry to mix it back in. That’s the process. You add one or two more handfuls of clay to your project for stability, hoping it sticks. Then again you put the mass on the wheel, centre, centre, centre. Centre. Add water. Centre. Push. Centre. Put in your thumb, push on the outside, and stop at the right point. Let it slide. It’s a feeling, some say.
For the project to take its clayey shape, it needs to have project friends. In this particular case, Nordic friends. We are already operating on the Baltic-Nordic economic corridor. The implementation of the Baltic Lines project over the past year has turned into a practice in itself for researching infrastructure. We invited artists from countries involved in the RB project (Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and moulded the clay within project frameworks, terms, and conditions. A styrofoam filling. Art theorist Claire Bishop states that the term ‘project’ has entered a time of crisis because who can determine what a successful project is in the end? When does a project end? There will always be another project – a manifesto, a hope, and sometimes a promise. A long line of raw clay works waiting to dry out. Bishop writes that the only way to evaluate a project is by its continuum: ‘a good project generates further projects afterward.’ A project lives in constant labour. Sometimes a project lives off another project. Sometimes it is born out of another project. Sometimes they are all relatives.
The artwork is a temporary Baltic Lines project office where visitors are invited to a space of virtual project-making witnessing acts in the Baltic-Nordic economic corridor for cultural production, on parallel tracks with Rail Baltic(a). The installation serves as a dramaturgy via negativa, a loophole of project bodies and eternal birth-giving. What does it take to be a successful project?
Photos by Gustavs Grasis