With articles starting from the legacies of occupation and exile to modern artwork, poetry, city historical past and anxieties surrounding synthetic intelligence, the present difficulty of Kultūros barai (Lithuania) reminds us that artwork and tradition don’t merely endure political, technological and historic upheavals: they assist societies make sense of them and, at occasions, grow to be catalysts for change.
AI aesthetics
As AI advances at breakneck velocity – and humanity hurtles alongside in its wake – how can we guarantee we’re on course? Evalina Biliunaite provides a refreshing tackle AI’s impression on artwork and the human thoughts. Quite than impoverishing thought, she argues, AI merely amplifies what’s already current inside us: ‘superficiality or depth, carelessness or precision, the need to impress or real mental self-discipline.’
Biliunaite, who designed the problem’s placing cowl, insists that prompting an AI shouldn’t be an alternative choice to creative creation however only one stage within the inventive course of, as a result of ‘each real inventive act begins within the human thoughts’ – know-how merely helps to appreciate that imaginative and prescient.
City heritage
Drawing on three letters from his personal papers, Vergilijus Čepaitis recounts the lengthy wrestle towards the erasure of city heritage in Vilnius through the twilight years of Soviet Lithuania. On the time, the USSR was sliding in direction of chapter, and the primary steps of perestroika have been underway. In Moscow, heritage safety was proclaimed with nice fanfare. But in Vilnius, the truth was very totally different.
The primary letter decries ‘the mutilation of the distinctive city ensemble on Tilto Avenue’ and calls for that these accountable be punished and the constructing restored. Quickly, letters from Vilnius residents defending the Outdated City flooded newspaper places of work, forcing the authorities, nonetheless briefly, to honour the much-touted ideas of openness and heritage.
Recent protests towards additional demolitions have been met not with dialogue however with excavators, and a sense of despair quickly set in. ‘The “Dobužinskis Home” had been saved,’ Čepaitis writes, ‘however the total perspective towards cultural heritage remained unchanged.’
But one thing had shifted. As residents fought for each scrap – or brick – of their city heritage, the broader motion for nationwide revival started to assemble momentum. ‘In Lithuania, no one spoke of defending Soviet tradition … for Lithuanians had begun combating for the suitable to be themselves, for his or her nationwide identification.’
Transferring to impartial Lithuania, Čepaitis argues that the wrestle has not disappeared, simply modified. Lithuania is not dominated by a faceless occupying energy, however heritage now faces totally different pressures – from institutional buck-passing to the sway of personal capital. Greater than ever, he argues, it falls to residents to reveal injustice and maintain these in energy accountable.
Traces of the previous
Martynas Purvinas additionally examines Lithuania via the lens of urbanity, providing a sweeping historic panorama of the nation’s city panorama and displaying how centuries of shifting borders, navy occupations and political upheaval have formed (and sometimes stifled) the event of its city tradition.
All through its historical past, Lithuania has stood on the crossroads of East and West, a place mirrored in its city DNA. ‘For a very long time, the territory of present-day Lithuania occupied a center floor between East and West and by no means turned the centre of an impartial city civilisation of its personal.’
Purvinas provides a whistle-stop tour of Lithuania’s turbulent previous, from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to independence, the occupations of the 20 th century and the Soviet post-war interval, revealing how every successive regime reshaped not solely its cities but in addition the communities that gave them life.
His tone is usually wistful, as he displays on what Lithuania’s city tradition may need grow to be had successive occupations, partitions and compelled migrations not disrupted its growth. Early 1941 noticed the repatriation of individuals of German descent from Lithuania to Germany; on 14 June, the primary mass Soviet deportations to Siberia started. Total city communities disappeared.
But reminiscence proved extra resilient than ideology. The Soviet authorities might nationalize buildings, rename streets and try and remake the cities in their very own picture, however they may not completely stamp out the nation’s heritage. ‘Lengthy-time city residents remembered Smetona-era retailers stuffed with each type of product: the occupiers couldn’t reach erasing the traces of the life that had existed earlier than.’
Fragments of the daddy
In her private essay, Dalia Vabalienė provides ‘fragments’ of post-war Lithuania, weaving collectively her mom’s recollections, excerpts from letters, official paperwork and her personal recollections to reconstruct her father’s ‘path of struggling’.
One of many organizers of the June Rebellion of 1941 and a member of the navy workers of the Lithuanian Activist Entrance (LAF), her father was arrested, deported, tortured and finally executed by the NKVD when she was nonetheless a child. Decided to uncover what turned of him after his arrest, Vabalienė set about compiling her personal ‘archive’: addresses, letters, images, testimonies from kinfolk and fellow prisoners and historians’ accounts.
The essay closes with a warning towards nostalgia for the Soviet previous. Vabalienė tells an outdated joke: a centenarian, requested underneath which authorities life in Lithuania had been greatest, replies, ‘Underneath the Tsar, my baby, underneath the Tsar. I used to be younger then, and the women have been fairly…’
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