lili um
"When I was a kid, I used to play this game called “secret”. It involved collecting some pretty and interesting things, my favourite were flower petals and sharp shiny pieces of trash; placing it under a fragment of a broken glass and covering it with dirt, to later unbury a miniature world of beauty."
a long song
Research, installation & performance Agnė Auželytė Sound Agnė Auželytė in collaboration with Soft Noise Collective & Liberty Snake Collaborators and hologram holders Ascan Delarber, Yadin Bernaue, Alla Kravchenko Set design consultant Ksenia Oganesyan | cure.tain Artistic advice Carly Rose Bedford Costume Lettau Art Fashion Mentor Ana Vujanovic Photography Ursula Marcussen Photography (documentation) Nellie de Boer, Gergely Ofner Video excerpt used from "Hold Your Horses" (2022) edited by Teaque Owen, footage from fake company archive Video documentation & trailer Gergely Ofner Video documentation Saskia Habermann
Special thanks to Cassie Thornton for publicly inviting the stealing of your work and imagining antidotes for more caring futures and Ula Liagaitė for bringing this methodology to my attention
Lilan Patri for ongoing inspirations on how to get on, sharing precious time and stories and allowing me to work in your garden
Shelley Etkin for blessing my life with your embodied knowledges on plants, compost and witchcraft
Photography historian, critic and curator Agnė Narušytė for bringing Vėra's photography and life story into the public attention
To Lithuanian Queer Archive for doing the beautiful and necessary work resisting historical erasure
Iconic dance artist Kathleen Hermesdorf (1967-2020), your legacy lives on
Production manager Charlot van der Meer Light and Sound Martin Kaffarnik & Rik van der Veen SNDO production Chantal Mooij PR coordinators Evelien van de Sanden and Antonella Fittipaldi Social media coordinator Karina Villafan Festival graphic design Ion Kazantzidis, Tom O’Doherty
premiere at Tempel Amsterdam March 2024
SNDO | PARADISE 2024
Lili um is a long song of veiling and unveiling at a site of autoethnographic archaeology.
Inspired by Cassie Thorton’s “The Hologram”, Veronika Šleivytė photography and personal biographical stories, this piece is thinking in triangular ways about trust, wishes and time; compliance, collaboration and resistance; health, wellness, and sickness. Searching for intimacy and care and ways forward in hopeless conditions. Leaning on the theoretical work of Ursula K. Le Guin, the work excitedly abandons the singular hero and instead manifests as a temporary artificial garden, vining and shimmering among the concrete walls of a former church.
Lili um is an ode to a multitude of underground spaces where care takes place.
Lili um is also a collection of love letters to queer ancestry, to bodies living with sickness and all the ghosts and spirits that keep me dancing.
CREDITS
"Welcome to the garden. We gather here every year to turn the compost."
