Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts

Chicago Boys: While we were singing, they were dreaming...

: Published on Wednesday, 24 March 2021 07:49

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Design by Jonas Žukauskas.

Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming

Initiated by Kurdish artist and musician Hiwa K in 2010, Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming is an ongoing, collective and transnational project that attempts to practice an alternative model for exploring the globalisation process and its impact on our daily culture through songs, first-hand experiences and lived-through, informal knowledge.

Since 2010 Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming has been studying the arrival of neo-liberalism and individualism at various locations around the world. The title refers to the Chicago Boys, a group of Chilean economists, and libertarian economic theories taught in the 1970s and 1980s at the University of Chicago, which signalled the beginning of the widespread implementation of neoliberalism, which in turn informed the political and cultural developments in the Middle East as well as the ex-Soviet countries over the last four decades.

The idea of the Chicago Boys as a 1970s Middle-East pop-music revival band and neoliberal study group was developed by Hiwa K as he was researching YouTube for documentaries about the Iraq war and its connection to neoliberalism, while listening to the music of his childhood. The simultaneity created a kind of environmental connectivity that is closely related not by the topic but by the concurrence of the events. Since 2010 Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming as format and approach was implemented in London and Gdansk (2010), Nottingham and as as a tour in the Netherlands (2011), Sofia and Delme (2013), Ammann (2014), and Bergen (2019). The Nida iteration of the project began in 2020 as Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Chicago Boys Nida Iteration

The first phase of the Nida edition of the project was realised in autumn 2020 with the local amateur women’s choir Smiltatė and the first findings were presented at the 2020 NU Performance Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. It was facilitated by Vika Matuzaitė, a social activist and practitioner working between cultural and educational spaces on social political issues including human rights, social justice, and activism. Members of the choir engaged in discussions looking for ways to explore the effects of neoliberalism in Neringa and the local people, and how they are felt to this day as well as the moments in which they manifest.

During the Soviet regime the Baltic region was subjected to social conservatism, therefore after the fall of the Iron Curtain the very sudden arrival of untamed neoliberalism hit everyone unexpectedly. People wanted democracy and were taken by surprise at its cost. Nida’s edition of the project unveiled how the narrative of independence can overshadow the ability to criticise a system that impacts peoples’ daily lives and how splatters of freedom-stickers and freedom-pop-hits has hidden and continues to hide to this day the true outreach of neoliberalism. This impact is sometimes even easier to hide in a small place with a big profit potential such as Nida, the holiday resort on the remote Curonian Spit.

In the second phase ‘study group’ was formed by Lithuania-based activists from G1PS Labour Union, Kaunas Zoo Musical Collective, Emma Social Centre, Luna6 Movement Space, and GPB News Portal. During the gathering at NAC in March 2022 the group looked at the neoliberal structures established over the past 30 years as an intrinsic part of daily life in Lithuania. During the meeting a rough timeline of indentations was established, discussing their consequences and associating songs with these moments. Besides the closing concert, the results of this process will materialise as a bibliography and a collection of books and reading / viewing / listening material as part of the NAC library.

Participants 2020–2022:

Women’s choir Smiltatė

Ignas Andriuškevičius (Kaunas Zoo musical collective)
Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė (Emma social center)
Danielė Liepa Bodrije (Kaunas Zoo musical collective)
Noah Brehmer (Luna6 movement space)
Emilija Švobaitė (GPB medial)
Žygimantas Menčenkovas (G1PS labor union)
Jurgis Valiukevičius (G1PS labor union)
Dovilė Lapinskaitė
Viktorija Kolbešnikova (GPB media)
Povilas Mintautas (Emma social centre)
Asta Volungė (Emma social centre)
Vasilisa Filatova

Coordinated and facilitated by Vika Matuzaitė and Egija Inzule.

The Nida version of Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. The first phase of the Nida edition was presented at the 2020 NU Performance Festival in Tallinn, Estonia.

118 photo by Andrej Vasilenko Chicago Boys concert, Nida 2022. Photo by Andrej Vasilenko.