April 12 a new space for learning about art, culture and history will open its doors in Vilnius - restored and adapted to modern city life baroque Sapiegi Palace. The new masters of the palace, Contemporary Art Center, invited five creators recognized in the Lithuanian and international cultural field to create sound experiences - independent works of art that can become alternative guides that allow you to experience the palace's spaces, history and environment in a different way. Audio tracks for the Sapiegi Palace can already be heard on the website www.sapiegurumai.lt.
According to Asta Vaičiulytė, the curator of the project, these sound works are like a greeting to the Sapiegi Palace and the new art institution that is being established there, inviting you to look at the palace building and its history through a creative and personal prism. "For the implementation of this idea, professional creators from different fields, working in one way or another with the forms of storytelling and sound, are invited. They were offered to freely interpret the history of the Sapiegi family and the entire architectural and archaeological heritage of the baroque ensemble, to find a way to unlock this distant history, using today's language, at least a little to the visitor of the palace and its ensemble," says A. Vaičiulytė.
The authors of the five sound works represent different creative practices - they are the writer Monika Kalin, the art critic and performer of old baroque music Renata Dubinskaitė, the artist, musician and composer Lina Lapelytė, the philosopher Kristupas Sabolius and the artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian. From a talk show to a mind-altering soundtrack, the sonic experiences inspired by the palace and its surroundings are unlike any other in duration or genre. The works express a curious, sometimes personal, and sometimes provocative dialogue with a distant historical era, trying to understand the man of that time and his worldliness. Alongside the historical reflection, the question arises as to what the history of the Sapieg family and the preserved architectural heritage mean to us today.
Last week, the show "Feast" hosted by Deimantė Bulbenkaitė and Audrius Pociaus was broadcast on the air of "Radio Vilnius", where the philosopher Kristupas Sabolius was a guest. The seemingly ordinary talk show is actually an audio piece conceived by K. Saboliaus, in which the history of the Sapiegi Palace becomes a kind of staging of his own past. K. Sabolius remembers his reaction to the invitation: "It was an unexpected offer, but very well calibrated with my past and personal experience of the historical deposits of Vilnius. Unlike the Trakai and Gediminas castles, the Sapiegi Palace has no place in our collective imagination. That seemed like a good start to me. In "Feast" everything is real and fake. Everything you hear happened to me or to historical characters, but as you know, fiction begins as soon as you start composing the story. The creation that appears in that composition testifies to our view of history and distorts it." K. Sabolis was concerned with crowning the great narratives, so the center of "Puotos" is Teresė Korvin Gosievskytė, the mistress of the Sapiegi Palace - an impressive and underestimated figure in the history of Lithuania and Poland. With his piece, K. Sabolius invites the listeners to become a detective: "I would be very interested if, while listening, someone would have the desire to follow the links to real stories hidden in this audio piece, to check how much truth there is in my story, and to find out what the further story could be or how else could tell this story. It would be an interesting exercise.”
The writer Monika Kalin says that she did not hesitate when she was invited and immediately knew that the form of the work would be a meditation recording, as she is currently very interested in the voice as a means of expression, and Sapiegi Park is associated with her own cathartic emotions. At the beginning of her piece "Voice of the Road", a recommendation for the visitor or visitors sounds. She/he is invited to choose a place in the palace or its surroundings where she/he can stop, sit quietly and close her/his eyes. "I myself, as an employee of another museum and a person who often visits art institutions, care about how we can experience ourselves in these spaces with all our difficulties and emotional weight. It looks like there will be plenty of spaces in this palace where a single person sitting on the sidelines and closing their eyes can feel safe. I wanted to create not a walking guide for deciphering spaces, but a piece that would help build a relationship, listening to which requires sitting down and being in the present moment," says the writer.
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Art critic and baroque music vocalist Renata Dubinskaitė says that she was intrigued by the idea of an artistic audio guide unfettered by the need for facts and accuracy typical of conventional guides. The work "Baroque man in life performance" features R. Dubinskaitė's historical narrative revealing the spirit of the era and two vocal works recorded in the great art of the Sapiegi Palace together with the theorbo and baroque guitar player Karl Nyhlin (Sweden). The author says that she chose the form of the work based on her two specialties: "I used to write a lot about art and teach, but later I became absorbed in baroque music. In order to perform it well, you need to be actively interested and delve into the worldview of the Baroque man. It is impossible to interpret Baroque scores without knowing the philosophy, psychology and mentality of the time. I wanted to look at the Sapiegi Palace from a baroque point of view. Two vivid events in the life of Jonas Kazimieros Sapiega, which illustrate the contrast of the Baroque era, became the fulcrum of my story. This era tended to exaggerate the extremes." R. Dubinskaitė's narration and her performance of sacred and secular music composed during the time of the palace builders allows us to better feel the theatricality, excess, joy of life, carnality, pleasures and religiosity that is different from the Renaissance era.
In the shortest work of the whole collection, "DIena ruʃti", the artist and composer Lina Lapelyta wanted to recreate the unity of the Sapiegi Palace, the architectural ensemble that includes the monastery and the park, the environment where the voices of the monks were heard from the very beginning. L. Lapelytė says that only after receiving the invitation to create a sound piece for the Sapiegi Palace did she want to record a pop song together with the Joanite brothers who now live in the Trinitarian monastery. Finally, the text of the church hymn "Dies irae" (from Latin - day of wrath) was included in her song, and the voices recorded during the monks' rites became the accompaniment of L. Lapelytė's voice. Although the hymn tells about the Day of Judgment, in L. Lapelytė's work it is a reference to the troubled today. According to the artist, while creating, she thought a lot about the past of the Sapiega Palace, which is tightly connected with various wars, and the figure of its builder, JK Sapiega, the warlike masculine nature and the feminine principle that can resist it. That's why the sound layers are important in her work - both female and male voices, as well as the text and singing forms of old times and the voice that brings back to these days.
Artist Andrius Arutiunian comes closest to the audio guide format in his work "Pleasures". It's an intoxicating soundtrack. Listening to him changes the experience of the spaces of the Sapiegi Palace and the works exhibited in them. According to the artist, his work is based on two things. One of them is the pseudo-scientific phenomenon of the early Internet, when it was claimed that a third frequency created by our brains can be heard at the intersection of two intersecting frequencies. This psychoacoustic effect creates a sonic environment that changes the way we see and hear the world. Another support of the work is ancient pharmacopoeias and tincture recipes recorded in them. According to them, the tinctures prepared were supposed to act similarly to audiopsychotropic substances that change the perception of reality. "I was interested in rethinking what an audio guide means in general and how it could function in a palace with different exhibits. My idea was to create a guide that would change the experience of any exhibition. As it relates to pleasures, ancient pharmacopoeias, and narcotics that alter our auditory receptors, it all comes together interestingly with both In the Sapiegi Palace the history of the operating hospital, as well as with the audio guide abstraction", says A. Arutiunian.
The five sound works are the result of the project "Sound Works for the Sapieg Palace" funded by the Lithuanian Culture Council. Sound works for the Sapiegi Palace will become a permanent part of the virtual exposition of the Sapiegi Palace. It can be experienced not only in the surroundings of the Sapiegi Palace.
