Gintaras Sodeika (b. 1961, Lithuania) et al
Veteranų rytmetis, 1988/89

All that jazz about the genealogy has triggered some unexpected walks “down the memory lane”. A vague, but fairly distinct memory of me in my mid-teens mesmerised by some bizarre happening on Soviet Lithuanian TV, involving a coffin being carried around in some smoke-covered fields. And then me writing a letter to the state TV requesting to air more happenings – a letter that was never answered.

As it is my earliest memory of encounter with the kind of art I am engaging with myself now, I decided to trace the piece I must have seen. The footage in my memory appeared in black and white, and all foreign influences were reaching public media of that time with a considerable delay – perhaps a decade later. Thus, I assumed it to have been something from the international classics of the genre. A couple of hours of creative googling rendered an unexpected answer – it was a spontaneous happening that occurred during the first or second happening festival in Lithuania in the late 1980s. And I was able to find a faded footage in colour that differed somewhat from my memory image, but was nevertheless recognisable.

The exact authorship is difficult to attribute as the only source I could find was an interview with Sodeika, himself a participant and one of the organisers of the festival. And, according to him, it was one of totally unplanned and unscripted events that just happened, involving a number of people improvising on the spot. And there just happened to be a TV crew nearby who got intrigued, dropped their own agenda and filmed the proceedings.

It’s truly interesting as I was totally unaware of those things happening so close to me at that time – that would have seemed even impossible given the totalitarian regime striving to control all the facets of the public (and often even significant part of the private) life. According to Sodeika, another piece at the same festival involved symbolic burials of various personalities and phenomena – including Joseph Beuys and Leonid Brezhnev. That part was certainly not shown on TV. Sodeika himself, a trained and practicing composer, has later held a number of prominent positions in independent Lithuania, including the role of vice-minister of culture.

…lately I’ve been feeling as if I’ve spent several decades in a coma, and now, newly awake, I am trying to reconnect with the boy I once was – yet having to carry along all the baggage accumulated over those years. Sometimes it is helpful, as in being wiser; sometimes it is burdening as in having to be wiser. Sometimes it is just confusing for myself and others in an odd mix of adolescent and adult whims, judgements and representations.