Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts

The Baltic Sea: A Liquid Memorial

: Published on Tuesday, 17 July 2018 17:56

Workshop

The Baltic Sea: A Liquid Memorial

September 16–23, 2018
Nida Art Colony

Workshop leaders
Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz

Almost every native inhabitant of the Curonian Spit was uprooted and turned into a migrant during and after the Second World War. Their places were quickly taken by newcomers. The leaders of The Baltic Sea: A Liquid Memorial take this episode as a historical example of a radical change and new co-existence. Even today on the Curonian Spit one can see an obvious manifestation of spatial, political, economic and cultural fragmentation – there is this short border next to Nida, which separates Lithuania or EU and Russia and divides the Curonian Spit into two halves.

There were times, when this border was more porous, when projects and meetings between Lithuanian and Kaliningrad organisations were more frequent than today. The Baltic Sea: A Liquid Memorial will try to restore these cracking cross-border ties. The organisers would like the participants to deal with the borders in a playful manner. The Curonian Spit is a nature reserve, which is cut through by a border guarded by border patrols. However, nature doesn’t recognise any borders. It overgrows physical borders and imagined boundaries, such as the so-called Iron Curtain in Berlin where nowadays people can go hiking or simply relax.

“With The Baltic Sea: A Liquid Memorial we aim to develop our own creative ways of inviting playful border crossings. One example could be to put up a volleyball net on the beach exactly on the spot where the borderline touches the waves of the Baltic Sea, to play a cross-border beach volleyball match with Russian and Lithuanian players and to document it. We could overcome the imaginary border on surf boards and boats using our self-created border-sails or kites. We will try to soften the edges of the political border between the two power blocks in an artistic and playful manner.” – Horst Hoheisel & Andreas Knitz.

It is planned to work with objects found “on site”, like beach chairs, boats, surf boards, bikes, etc., as well as with natural materials. The results of The Baltic Sea: A Liquid Memorial will be documented and published online. The leaders are partnering with the touring exhibition On Visible and Invisible Borders, which will be installed at the Jewish Museum Munich in 2019. It might be possible to present the results of the workshop there.

The workshop leaders Horst Hoheisel & Andreas Knitz have worked together since 1994 on many memorial projects known as counter-monuments or negative monuments. They are searching for new contemporary forms of commemoration of the victims of mass murder and dictatorships, mainly in Germany, but also in South America, Armenia, Cambodia and elsewhere. Instead of repairing the irreparable, their goal is to make the absence of murdered people visible and felt.

The most notable of their projects is the memorial in Buchenwald – a steel plate on the ground of the former concentration camp that always retains the temperature of a human body, day and night, in summer and in winter. Hoheisel also made the most radical proposal to the 1995 competition for the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Rather than suggesting another edifice to fill a void and allow everyone to forget it, he proposed instead, to create a void – to destroy a monument to German power, the Brandenburg Gate. The artists have participated in Kaunas Biennial in 2017. Both are based in Kassel, Germany.

The workshop is part of the project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the EU.

Organiser