Publications & NAC Log
- Published on Monday, 28 November 2011 11:01
Dwelling on the Threshold
Handbook Dwelling on the Threshold documents a three-day intensive workshop that took place at Nida Art Colony in October 2019, exploring the notion of thresholds as spaces of passage, flux, and fluidity, as well as blockage in terms of political and personal borders that separate us from others. It brings together photo documentation of the workshop sessions and texts by the workshop tutors, as well as additional texts on phenomena encountered during the workshops, and reflections by the participants on the key concepts of the workshop and their individual experiences at Nida Art Colony.
The presented handbook, as well as the workshop under the same title and the forthcoming exhibition in Summer 2020, are both part of the project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality Through Creativity and Culture, which is a cooperation project in the framework of the European Union’s programme Creative Europe 2014-2020.
Editor:
Rado Ištok
Contributors:
Joanna Warsza and Jan Sowa
Shahram Khosravi
Natalia Tikhonova
Anna Karpenko
Candice Hopkins
Eglė Budvytytė
Elin Már Øyen Vister
Download PDF here
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Dr Vasilijus Safronovas Migrants and Refugees on the Curonian Spit: Resettlement in the Mid-20th Century
In this research study Dr Vasilijus Safronovas tackles the subject of migration which can hardly be counted as being of minor importance today. The frequent changes of place of residence tha we can observe in today's mobile society contribute towards this as much as people fleeing or being forced from their homes as a result of social or economic problems or armed conflict. However, unlike the focus put on the topic of migration by the general public, studies by historians looking at mass displacement may only partly be considered an occasional phenomenon. In Lithuania such topic is relatively recent. A study by Dr Vasilijus Safronovas is not the first to examine mingration on the Curonian Spit (Kurt Forstreur, Friedrich Mager, Arūnė Liucija Arbašauskaitė must be mentioned) and here some previous issues are inevitably revisited. This book consist of three chapters covering a rather long period up to 1945, the prewar residents of the northern section, and the changes that took place prior to 1961.
Since July 2017 NAC has been involved as a partner in the project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality Through Creativity and Culture, which is a cooperation project in the framework of the European Union's programme Creative Europe 2014-2020. The first project activity at Nida Art Colony was the research residency of Prof Dr Vasilijus Safronovas, researcher at the Institute of Baltic Region History and Archaeology at Klaipėda University. The research aim was to study the patterns of emigration and immigration from and to the Curonian Spit after WWII. It culminated in an illustrated publication in Lithuanian and English Migrants and Refugees on the Curonian Spit.
Read the digital book on ISSUU website
Tourists Like Us. Critical Tourism and Contemporary Art
This book opens up a new field of discussion at the crossroads between contemporary art and critical tourism. As common ground for theoretical inquiry and artistic research, the notion of critical tourism asks us to question again our understanding of authenticity, the tourist gaze, the museification of landscape, the visual construction of place, post-romanticism, contemporary exoticism, site-specificity and global connectedness. The book specifically explores the role of the artist, and of the art institution, in the age of destination culture. How are individual and institutional practices changing in an era of hosting, hospitality, displacing and cultural nomadism?
Based on the comparison between two very different but nonetheless similar landscapes the Swiss Alps and the Baltic Dunes and Beaches art historians, environmental historians, geographers, explorers, curators and artists address the relatively new field of critical tourism in a transdisciplinary context. Together they consider how to critically approach and understand seductive and remote landscapes, against the backdrop of global cultural tourism. The book is not only a critical account of discussions around the topics but it is also rich in visual materials, documents and descriptions of artistic interventions in these two touristic settings. This publication is the result of over a year of exchanges between ECAV Ecole Cantonale d Art du Valais in Sierre (Switzerland) and Nida Art Colony (NAC), which belongs to the Vilnius Academy of Arts (Lithuania). The book reviews the concepts, residencies, exhibitions, workshops and the symposium that formed this exchange between 2012 to 2013, in the context of the research and residency programme On Hosting and Displacing: Artistic Residencies and Cultural Production in Remote Contexts .
Editors:
Federica Martini
Vytautas Michelkevičius
Contributors:
Bill Aitchison (UK)
Benoit Antille (CH)
Sebastian Cichocki (PL)
Contingent Movements Archive - Hanna Husberg (FI), Laura McLean (AU) and Kalliopi Tsipni-Kolaza (GR)
Liesje De Laet (BE)
Jurij Dobriakov (LT)
Paul Domela (UK)
Barnaby Drabble (CH/ES)
Gilles Furtwängler (CH)
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (DE/CH)
Petra Koehle and Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin (CH)
Juozas Laivys (LT)
David Larsson (SE)
Henning Lundkvist (SE)
Federica Martini (CH)
Vytautas Michelkevičius (LT)
Sibylle Omlin (CH)
Agnieszka Polska (PL)
Ramūnas Povilanskas (LT)
Adrien Siberchicot (FR)
Sam Skinner (UK)
Markus Soukup (UK)
Yulia Startsev (RU/DE)
Laura Stasiulyte (LT)
Collective Synops (CH) - Maëlle Cornut and Sté́phanie Giorgis
Marika Troili (SE)
Catalogue of the project Between Time and History
Goethe-Institut, Institut Français in Lithuania, Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and independent curator Julija Čistiakova are pleased to present residency project “Between Time and History”, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty and European integration development.
Three artists – Martin Neumaier (Germany), Dominique Blais (France) and Žilvinas Landzbergas (Lithuania) – spent almost two months in the residency in Nida. They were employed to think about history’s bearing on the present in this particular small piece of land. It is important how the artists percieve the history that has been changing people’s consciousness and have nostalgia of the things that will never happen. M. Neumaier focused on the question what does it mean to be a German? How future and the past can be bound together and why it is important for him to find the answers to his questions. Ž. Landzbergas’s personal mythologies, which consist of tiny details important only to the artist, of his feelings on the seaside during the residency, are resulting into the site-specific installation that refers to Lithuanian traditional mythology and has many symbolic meanings. In his works, D. Blais has been researching the ideas of solitude and isolation as well as contraversion between East and West in a figurative and literate sense. The time and political contexts are changing, but certain landscape elements remain the same.
The artists were encouraged to navigate real and imagined territories and times – geographic, political, economic and social by revealing how the forgotten personal and communal construct the nostalgia of/for the future. The show functions as an archive of parallel micro-narratives, expanding on the notion as a means of touching upon local chronotops. The exhibition strives to formulate an unstable and fragmentary cartography where spatial and time collisions often result in conditions close to a pseudo-modernist melancholy. Finally, it reveals how cultural mythologies are inscribed into a personal Time-Space/Landscape-Memory equation.
Corinne Roche, Nils Mohl, Eglė Paulina Pukytė Susitikimas, kurio nebuvo / Une improbable rencontre / Das Treffen, das es nicht gab
The programmes of literature and contemporary art were successfully combined in the joint project of Goethe‘s institute, the festival partner, and VDA Nida Art Colony writers: Nils Mohl, Corinne Roche and Paulina Eglė Pukytė read excerpts from their texts created on the topic of a fictitious meeting of Thomas Mann and Jean Paul Sartre in Nida.
A meeting in an afterlife hotel, Th.Mann‘s panic attacks in front of dunes and discussions with J. P. Sartre about the future of Europe including the genres of the essay, drama and novel - it seems that the framework of the theme did not restrict the authors‘ creativity, and the combination of three different European languages in one event was fascinating.
What could’ve happened if Thomas Mann would’ve met Jean-Paul Sartre in the dunes of Nida? Ignoring the limits imposed by time-space, we’re raising this question to three professional writers, selected by Goethe Institute, French Institute and Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts. We hope they will take their time to elaborate on the question during their residency period starting in April and ending in mid-May 2014.
The three writers: Corinne Roche (FR), Paulina Pukytė (LT), Nils Mohl (DE) are the authors of this BLOG, which is the reflection of their quotidian life in Nida, following the footsteps of those who were there, and creating paths to things that might have happened.
The project is a common initiative ofGoethe Institut Litauen, L’Institut français de Lituanie and Nida Art Colony.
Dainius Liškevičius's project Museum is presented in the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts. The pavilion is organised by curator and commissioner Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius, 2nd commissioner Rasa Antanavičiūtė, producer Daina Pupkevičiūtė and the pavilion team.
You can comfortably browse all NAC Logs on ISSU platform.
Log No. 9 On Lines & Rituals
Log No. 8 On Newness
Log No. 7 On Time
Log No. 6 On Techno-ecologies
Log No. 5 On Critical Tourism
Log No. 4 On Taking time
Log No. 3 On Remoteness
Log No. 2 On Summer
Log No. 1
