Background Melody
Excerpt from the work realized during the Kaunas Photography Gallery residency, produced in autumn 2018 in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Everything started from a fact, the number of urban elements related to modernist architecture were countless, and this was an essential part of Kaunas, mark from the past stuck in the walls, at a time where the city was capital of Lithuania – between 1920 and 1940. Later, there were a documentary drive immersed in an uncertain time, when any presence withdraw and human activity is suspended by the night, as if it only existed through surrounding objects, like a memory of a recent or more distant past. Then in the dark, arose a feeling of nonsense, of vanity, despite all what those objects on the surface could symbolized ; from the buildings reflecting a bygone era to the most recent street furniture, all those familiar things belonging to different times appeared to be like a coherent whole, like a light footprint frozen in the obscurity of time marching on, as if that vision of a scrappy townscape could be defined with just one word : Reminiscence.
Background Melody :
Urban elements would be like hypothesis, lingering sounds from an envisioned past, built up in parcels when Kaunas was capital during interwar period.
Here we probably see an evolving city,
There a modernist building, for sure,
And now the streets, almost new,
Innovating components from a particular time.
And all those images would be collected as unreal objects, or more precisely : uncertain subjects literally before our eyes. It is like reading notes on a music score, at first sight it makes no sense, some of those notes are erased or obscured, but it piques curiosity over time spent on that uncanny map, making us have to rewrite and interpret the background melody.
Everything started from a fact, the number of urban elements related to modernist architecture were countless, and this was an essential part of Kaunas, mark from the past stuck in the walls, at a time where the city was capital of Lithuania – between 1920 and 1940. Later, there were a documentary drive immersed in an uncertain time, when any presence withdraw and human activity is suspended by the night, as if it only existed through surrounding objects, like a memory of a recent or more distant past. Then in the dark, arose a feeling of nonsense, of vanity, despite all what those objects on the surface could symbolized ; from the buildings reflecting a bygone era to the most recent street furniture, all those familiar things belonging to different times appeared to be like a coherent whole, like a light footprint frozen in the obscurity of time marching on, as if that vision of a scrappy townscape could be defined with just one word : Reminiscence.
Background Melody :
Urban elements would be like hypothesis, lingering sounds from an envisioned past, built up in parcels when Kaunas was capital during interwar period.
Here we probably see an evolving city,
There a modernist building, for sure,
And now the streets, almost new,
Innovating components from a particular time.
And all those images would be collected as unreal objects, or more precisely : uncertain subjects literally before our eyes. It is like reading notes on a music score, at first sight it makes no sense, some of those notes are erased or obscured, but it piques curiosity over time spent on that uncanny map, making us have to rewrite and interpret the background melody.
