When All This Is Over, Let’s Meet Up! + Agents

LITHUANIA
National premiere – video-installation

Anastasia Sosunova is a visual artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her interdisciplinary practice combines video, installation, writing and sculpture, and focuses particularly on the ties around which communities are formed, from local vernacular art to social housing neighbourhoods and religious organisations. Sosunova assesses how these closed groups are often formed as a reaction to different values and people, and how they subsist through common feelings and the creation of rituals, traditions and collective agreements. 

Through a process of distortion and the interlacing of elements from old mythologies, hybrid identities and a society of surveillance, Sosunova produces alternative forms of “contemporary folklore”, exploring new narratives and ways of life that require rules, ethics, codes and agreements between living beings.

“When all this is over, let’s meet up!” is a piece centred around rites of secular passage and protection in modern Lithuania. Residents confined to neighbourhoods, hiding away from their demons, crossing their strong gates every day. Wonderful street names – valleys, hills, pine forests, etc. – concealing fences and private beaches, watchmen and adverts of young happy families, promises of a safe future and of wishes coming true. An opportunity to escape the turmoil created by them, to find like-minded people, build thresholds and avoid the unwanted fluxes from the city.

“Agents” is a short film that contemplates the aesthetics of popular art in contemporary culture, observing the effects caused on the public space by the strict rules of lockdown due to the pandemic. Revisiting and filming places and public sculptures traditionally built with crafts and materials from the region, Sosunova notices how visitors gradually fill forests and parks with spontaneous vernacular art and temporary structures. Investigating what is behind the revival of popular art and vernacular creation, the protagonist of the video starts a conversation with a craftsman who shares his intentions to reproduce ethnic imagery and to create new myths over old ones.

“When all this is over, let’s meet up”
Sound design and music: Miša Skalskis
3D animation: Laurynas Keleras
10’25’’
2021

“Agents”
Single channel video, sound
14’57’’
2020
Commissioned for “Roots to Routes,” 2020, curated by Juste Kostikovaite, Maija Rudovska and Merilin Talumaa, with the support of the Baltic Culture Fund