Dear Gerda and Gabija,
I’m writing to you from Scotland and right now. The spring is still here, the daffodils are out. A friend of mine showed me the wild daffodils, whose numbers have declined because of habitat loss. I hadn’t really noticed them before. Their petals are pale, pale yellow, they are small and delicate. Garden varieties are tall and proud with flowers marked by egg-yolk yellow trumpets.
It’s also the season when the rhododendrons come out. I never saw rhododendrons when I lived in Lithuania. You see forests of these bushy trees with their twisting branches and great flowers of purple, white, fuchsia, blood red or yellow. Often, they are found in aristocratic estates, along with magnificent trees like the Cedar of Lebanon. Rhododendrons are so vibrantly over the top. When you see these mounds of colour, often humming with bees and set against dark green pines, it’s like looking at a 19th-century opera set, all luscious romance and colour, but edged with an awareness that it is all pasteboard and lighting. They are poisonous too.
A couple of days ago I went for a walk near an old pond, which is edged with a strange variety of primroses and the Jurassic mass of giant rhubarbs which are just now awakening from their winter slumber. You can see their enormous roots emerge like a shaggy beast from the banks of the pond, covered in the spiked, dead stalks and leaves of last year’s growth.
When I was walking there it was like being in some strange atmosphere, not so much made up of individual stalks and petals and colours and botanical names, but shifting washes, a peculiar radiance. It felt melancholic in a way, perhaps because the scene felt irreal, somehow beyond frames of reference and memory (the opera set, those nineteenth-century paintings of aristocrats at play in the garden, those mysterious scenes by Watteau, all tinged with sadness that it isn’t quite real, that something dark lurks beyond, behind, elsewhere). All these landscapes are exclusive in a way, composed by 19th-century aristocrats with their spoils of empires, their trade in seeds, their love of dream worlds all dusty pink, chintzy and glowing, to be wondered into on a summer evening. It’s a fragile beauty, removed and yet built from dank, close hard labour.
This atmospheric place, with its dense air of bird song, colours and light and moisture, is so richly a garden, in that it is its own world removed from yet defined by the landscape around it which it is not: the intensively farmed fields, the city and tarmac, the wild, treeless hills. I remembered a story I was told by my dad about the memoirs of a servant from one of the great British country houses. The servant said that they would take revenge on their masters by keeping the landscape and environment perfect, with not a leaf out of place, because they knew that when it would all go, when the edifice crumbled and their masters were confronted with the awkward, messy reality of the world around them, they wouldn’t be able to bear it.
I’ve taken solace in this garden. It really is beautiful. I wonder at the atmosphere and how it is paradoxically both acute and impossible to articulate or grasp. It made me think of Virginia Woolf, whom you had mentioned in one of your emails to me, and how she created worlds that seemed offered to us partially wrapped in some obscure light or tissue paper. There’s another idea about how we look at and try to understand the world which is all about twisting, wrenching and unwrapping other beings into clarity and truth. What a cruel vision of curiosity and what an arrogant thought that is: that if only we hold down something enough it will hand over everything. Empires acted and continue to act on this logic. But, of course, never is everything handed over or given up. There are gaps between those fingers, a fist is never completely tight. A seed will escape.
There’s a sentence I like by Anna Tsing. She reminds us that ‘none of us live in a global system; we live in places’. I think to what David Ruebain and I talk a lot about – or argue about! Which is how to speak about oppression without reducing all our lives and interactions to its insidious force; how to refuse to let oppression carry a capital O, like a gasping mouth. I like the work of the economists J.K. Gibson-Graham who similarly warn us against ‘speaking capitalism into being’ by homogenising it as one system, not the myriad different forms of exchange across the world that make it the complex, fraying fabric it is.
I’m reminded of how violent simplifications can be. How grasping and stifling the naming of something can be too. I look back at this shimmering garden, like a Bonnard painting. So much life!
Do you know A Passage to India, a novel by Woolf’s contemporary, E.M. Forster? Also a queer, if we can call him that, which gave him a sense of the damage of names and titles and categories. In that book, there is a scene where a white English couple, in love but incapable of expressing intimacy, argue over the name of a bird. Then the bird flies away. They never see the bird. They just argue over its name:
‘“Do you know what the name of that green bird up above us is?” she asked, putting her shoulder rather nearer to his.|
“Bee-eater.”
“Oh no, Ronny, it has red bars on its wings.”
“Parrot,” he hazarded.
“Good gracious no.”
The bird in question dived into the dome of the tree. It was of no importance, yet they would have liked to identify it, it would somehow have solaced their hearts.’
Quietness, and confusion, the play of contradictions: I want you to know that when I’ve been walking through these gardens, both of your work have been with me, shaping how I see and feel where I’ve been.
I’ve got to go now for a walk before the sun disappears but send me pictures of the exhibition.
Your Y
Gabija Nedzinskaitė (b. 1998) is a spatial practitioner currently living and working in Amsterdam. Her practice is a remix of objects, industrialized experiences of narratives, failed renders and invisible interventions. Gabija’s works usually consist of objects that have undergone different stages of transformation or manipulation. These transformations are essential to her spatial research. Gabija recently graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (Architectural Design Department).
Gerda Paliušytė (b. 1987) is an artist and curator based in Vilnius. She is interested in various documentary practices, historical and popular cultural phenomena and characters as well as their relationship with social reality. Paliušytė’s work often explores collective practices and various forms of tacit agreements. Recent exhibitions include two solo editions of For Cecil, at Lavender Opener Chair Gallery in Tokyo (2021) and the Prospect Gallery in Vilnius (2020).
Thank you: Autarkija, Gediminas G. Akstinas ir Gediminas Akstinas, Aurimė Žakaitė, Pavel Zalescevskij, Andrej Vasilenko, Simonas Kuliešius, Edgaras Aškelovič, Vytautas Gečas, Jokūbas Čižikas, Alexandra Bondarev.
Exhibition text: Yates Norton
Thank you: Autarkija, Gediminas G. Akstinas ir Gediminas Akstinas, Aurimė Žakaitė, Pavel Zalescevskij, Andrej Vasilenko, Simonas Kuliešius, Edgaras Aškelovič, Vytautas Gečas, Jokūbas Čižikas, Alexandra Bondarev.
‘We Live in Places’
Gabija Nedzinskaitė, Gerda Paliušytė
May 27 – June 26, 2022
Mečetės st. 4, Vilnius
Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela
Gerda Paliušytė and Gabija Nedzinskaitė The Auction Clock of Royal FloraHolland: An Episode, 2022