Is it possible to give voice again to a now silent narrative? Is it possible to make the heritage of a people travel? If we leave it to the works of Augustas Serapinas, then the answer is yes. The artist, in fact, creates installations by taking elements of typical Lithuanian architecture and, after uprooting and reconfiguring the parts, brings them back to life in a new form, grafting them into a globalised network of arts and traditions. Those buildings, thus, become wandering witnesses of an extremely specific and living history, the one in which the owners of the ‘abducted’ architectures were protagonists. The artefact acts as a sextant along a cultural, temporal and spatial journey from ancestral Lithuania to industrialised Europe. A stop along this journey is Wooden travel, Serapinas’ solo exhibition held at ICA Milan and curated by Chiara Nuzzi.
Augustas Serapinas, “Wooden Travel”, installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. Melania Dalle Grave DSL Studio, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano
Through a practice of assemblage, restoration and transformation, the artist renders the material legacies of Lithuanian memory. The material, as well as historical memory, with which he weaves this special relationship of remodelling is that of the Vienkiemis, the typical Lithuanian wooden dwellings. Erected following a game of stable but fragile joints, these wooden constructions constitute the raw material worked by the artist and at the same time the rich heritage that the institution of the art work wishes to preserve. In the interweaving of preservation and transformation, Serapinas’ poetics is born: rethinking space as a place of anchorage to vernacular roots and an opportunity for cultural intermingling. Pollution with other traditions, first and foremost represented by the places that host the works (such as ICA in Italy or Biennales around the world), subjects the Vienkiemis to formal and conceptual shifts. Roof tiles become paintings, the walls of houses take on a different configuration and delineate new environments within the exhibition rooms. Thus, the viewer, forced to interface with destabilising yet surprisingly harmonious structures, enters a relational space.
Vienkiemis, archive image, courtesy the artist
The relationships between viewer and work, between work and architecture and between architecture and viewer animate a circular relationship, which raises the question of the possibility of coexistence – as individuals and as a community – within an environment-world traversed by the paradox between the attachment to an original time, the father of our cultural identity, and the inevitable erosion of historical memory, obscured by the progress of globalised civilisation. One of the key themes of the exhibition, in this respect, is the strong contrast between the works exhibited – warm, welcoming, traditional – and the industrial setting in which the gallery is located – cold, repulsive, anonymous. The exhibition does not impose any path to follow, but on the contrary obliges the visitor to a full and destabilising freedom, albeit limited by the structure of the exhibition context. One is therefore free to walk among the installations, to walk around them and look through them, equipped only with one’s own ability to orient oneself in an enclosed space, a space that is mapped physically by the unprecedented design produced by the artist and mentally by the perceptual dissonance between environment and work.
Augustas Serapinas, “Wooden Travel”, installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. Melania Dalle Grave DSL Studio, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano
How, then, is this work of apparent desecration of the remains of tradition to be interpreted? The uprooting practice of Serapinas, who extracts the wood of Lithuanian houses from his own land, is nothing but the grafting of a vernacular identity into a new interconnected and transformed world. Moreover, the modifications adopted by the artist on the found object are indeed a sign of artistic gestures, but they also represent the metaphor of the course of a people’s history, a history destined to be reshaped and relived according to changing political, geographical and narrative coordinates. The nature of wood reinforces this metaphorical value, given its intrinsic versatility. Not only can wood itself be forged in various ways, but also the constructions of which wood is the raw material can be dismantled, reassembled and changed. Moreover, the versatility and material-conceptual pliability of the architectures taken up by the artist (part of the real estate heritage of Lithuanian culture) are enhanced by the mobility with which the artist endows them, making the Vienkiemis travel to new geographical horizons and reformulated narratives from exhibition to exhibition.
Augustas Serapinas, “Wooden Travel”, installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. Melania Dalle Grave DSL Studio, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano
If we want to draw a conclusion from the artistic experience offered to us by Serapinas, we understand that the only way to preserve the materiality of vernacular architecture can be an immaterial approach, which makes the artefacts of a people the first witnesses of the founding logos of a cultural identity.
Info:
Augustas serpainas, Wooden Travel
13/12/2024 – 15/03/2025
ICA Milano – Via Orobia 26, 20139 Milano
www.icamilano.it
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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