Obsession: Browsing in guest mode

1. Mykolaitis NAC paroda 24
Photo: Lukas Mykolaitis


OBSESSION: BROWSING IN GUEST MODE


Hi, I've arrived.
I made it to Nida. What you see on your screen is the first in a sequence of letters – a collection of stories and observations about land, belonging and space-giving that were collected in the process of working on the exhibition
Obsession, and were written down as side notes, while nevertheless being crucial to the way it grew and came to be. The first departure point in sharing these stories, dear reader, is through the lens of being a guest.

It was hot, and the nudist beach to get the perfect tan was crowded. I spent a long time waiting in line at the only grocery store in town to buy a bottle of cool, carbonated water. All the while listening to a news broadcast in which an economist was being interviewed about the global recession, and was speaking of it as if it were a change in the weather – an uncontrollable and mystical force. The visitors of Neringa municipality are susceptible to ‘bad’ weather. In fact, the tourism economy here is the weather itself. 

The hospitality industry is entwined with summertime and warm mid-season weekends during transitional periods. A strong gust of wind, or Ylingė as it translates in Miglė Vyčinaitė sculptures, is the main player of local economic turbulence. Prepare the sledge in the summer or take advantage of the favourable circumstances to earn a livelihood while they last. Before long, the summer shopswill be closed, the supermarket won’t welcome customers till midnight and will revert to regular opening hours, and most cafes and bars will only reopen in spring.

I remember walking the empty streets of dormant Nida during my previous stay. It was winter. No people were in sight, only a handful of stray cats sitting like silent sculptures, dignified guards of the ghost town. Like the stray dogs on the outskirts of Istanbul in Annika Eriksson’s video, ‘they always manage’. Later, in conversations with the townspeople, I discovered that the tourist routes during the (s)low season are reclaimed by wildlife – boars, moose, and foxes come to town.

‘Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply,’ writes the poet Ocean Vuong when comparing human migration to that of monarch butterflies. I heard there were fewer tourists this year because of the cold summer, the close proximity to the terrorist state, and the looming financial crisis. Yet here I am. Vuong adds, ‘It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation’ [1]. 

First and foremost, we are guests here. Be it the newcomers resettled to the peninsula by the Soviets after WWII or later in the 1950s, while the remaining locals were compelled to depart [2], or visitors, just like me. Coming and going in search of authentic experiences, the tourist industry contrives to commodify the experiences of these visitors. And although I didn’t buy a magnet depicting Nida's iconic weathervane with a wild moose, I couldn’t pass by the amber jewellery that the seller said comes from here. It felt more real somehow, and made me feel content. 

At some point, I started noticing people obsessing about the border. I went on an hour-long boat tour in anticipation of hearing some of the promised stories of the Curonian Lagoon. Our tour guide and the captain mentioned that we were close to the border around ten times: we are approaching the Russian border, the Lithuanian border is also the frontier of the EU, this is the end of the Schengen Area, look, the fence marks a line you cannot cross, and this floating red buoy controls the space on water, the white and green ship belongs to the border guards, they work here every day, it is not possible to go further. The edge of the Earth, the end of the EU and human rights is right here – a good spot for a photo. I thought of Zoe Leonard – what line from the Niagara Falls postcards would fit best? 

Have been at this place today. Wish you were all here. I can’t tell you how grand it all is. [3]

2


I was recently reading an article by Sibylle Omlin on Hans Magnus Enzensberger's
A Theory of Tourism which is probably one of the first attempts to theorise tourism as a modern phenomenon. ‘In it he sees modern tourism as still motivated by romantic ideas of untouched (authentic) worlds. This quest for authenticity then, paradoxically, falls in on itself since it becomes harnessed by the very same society that in all of its incoherency produced the need for authenticity in the first place’ [4], writes Omlin. Although the author also argues it is an illusion that an authentic past in the form of the rural and peasant society ever existed, it looks like Nida resists this thought with every square metre. The unified canon of fishermen’s village architecture on the peninsula can even be seen in the dog’s kennels, which are painted in a corresponding shade of blue and have precisely the right roof inclination angle. This theatrical staging of the fisherman's village that is practically devoid of fishermen is no contradiction to the Airbnbfication of the historical part of the town. And not just the centre. 

However, be it Hawaii, Bali, or the Curonian spit, the locals settle on the outskirts. In Nida’s Purvyne district, they’ve crafted the real vernacular architecture tradition – remaking Soviet garage complexes into crowded DIY cottage rows for dwelling. I went for a tour there, in search of authenticity and took a couple of photos. I hated my own gaze, yet I couldn’t stop looking. 

How would you like to take this picture? How would you like to visit here? How would you like to be in this? [5]

When the whole area is inhabited by incomers and guests, who is in charge? When does someone become local? Organising an exhibition in an artist residency/hotel and a waste collection site, I was obsessed with the idea of locality. Aren’t you? The dilemma of space, to whom it belongs and who is responsible for it was crucial to answer to keep going. 

I’ll tell you more in the next few letters. 

Text: Anastasia Sosunova and Diāna Mikāne




 

[1]  Vuong, O. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. London: Penguin Press, 2019.
[2] Safronovas, Vasilijus. Migrants and Refugees on the Curonian Spit: Resettlement in the Mid-20th Century. Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2019.
[3] Leonard, Z. This is where I was. In Zoe Leonard: You See I Am Here After All. Dia Art Foundation, 2010.
[4] Omlin, S. The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies. In F. Martini & V. Michelkevicius (Eds.), Tourists Like Us: Critical Tourism and Contemporary Art, 2013.
[5] Leonard, Z. This is where I was. In Zoe Leonard: You See I Am Here After All. Dia Art Foundation, 2010.