The space between — interview with Ana Lipps

I’m typing this on the train back from Telšiai, passing neighbourhoods of fields, neatly delineated and then complicated by additions of bushes, trees, concrete and wooden buildings, openness and walls, the occasional colourful blossom only seen as a trace in short-term memory or elderflower I can’t smell. I ended up here yesterday after embarking on a road trip with Ana Lipps as they transported heaps of glued-together animal bones with interwoven lights, in preparation for their upcoming exhibition at VDA Telšių Galerija, ‘There is still room in the bag of stars’, opening on July 2.

We met while doing Rupert’s (centre for art, residencies and education in Vilnius) Alternative Education Programme in 2022 and have continued to entwine further as friends and colleagues (we share a studio in Spaudos Rūmai, after all). As with all good friends, we have lots in common, not least the shared intersections of our identities that allows us to step into each other’s perspective with a certain ease.

With a Lithuanian diplomat for a mother and a German businessman for a father, Ana grew up between the two countries, before embarking on a bachelor’s in the UK, followed by a master’s at the Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Rupert brought them to Vilnius again and they have chosen to stay, for now.

This drive we took, between Vilnius and their grandma’s kaimas in Telšiai, is not an unfamiliar journey for them, and in between our stops at Circle K, we chatted about their practice, upcoming exhibition and what it means to be suspended between points A and B.

Ana Lipps: I think this drive is a journey home, in either direction. I feel very cosy in airports, just from the way I’ve grown up; we were travelling a lot. Liminal spaces are really homey for me and driving in a car is a calming experience. I don’t feel stressed about taking a bus or an airplane; these journeys tend to not be just dead time, but time where I get to think, reflect, also listen to music or audiobooks, be inspired… they’re very productive.

With the yellowing teeth of wide-jawed animals smiling behind us, the conversation inevitably turns macabre, as Robbie Williams plays through the speakers.

AL: When I was younger, I saw my grandad’s body and I had the sensation he was going to wake up. I was terrified of him getting buried because I thought he was just sleeping and I was freaking out the entire funeral. When my dad died, I was really scared I would have the same freak-out, but then I had such a relief because I just stood at the casket and thought ‘That’s not him. He’s not here anymore’.

Dovydas Laurinaitis: All this talk about life and death, needing proof of one state or the other, I sense a lot of desire to hold the in-between as that’s where the possibility is, I think you told me that at some point. Once you get from A to B, they’re fixed states.

AL: In my work, I’m not so much thinking about death, more so spaces of transition. I don’t find bones that macabre. Maybe I just spent too much time gluing them together. In the way the exhibition will be set up, the bones are not the focal point. Among many things, there will also be vats of black liquid that smell of unrefined petroleum being stirred and creating a vortex. It’s actually using that washing machine mechanism in the back.

AL: I think it’s one of my favourite parts of making art. Creating these absolutely insane problems for myself and figuring out how to make it a reality. The way I create work is that I suddenly get a vision in my head and afterwards realise where it came from. With this piece, I was also driving from Vilnius to my grandma’s last October. It was after the Rupert Halloween party and I was a bit hungover and it was really dark, I was spiralling and thinking ‘I’m never going to create any work ever again’.

DL: Why did you think that?

AL: 2023 was just so uninspired for me. I guess I was dealing with a lot of trauma and trying to process it. I had no space to create work in my head and it took me a while to get out of that space. The first image I got was a starry sky, as a container of different narratives. Humans have always created stories through looking at the sky and naming the stars, or creating constellations. Usually, these are creation narratives as well, which tell you a lot about a culture, the people, and how they perceive themselves in relation to everything else in the world and each other, how they structure their society… The sky definitely creates this liminal effect, it doesn’t hold a singular truth, it can hold many truths simultaneously.

DL: So inspiration came when you were feeling very hopeless. You mentioned liminality, which you explore in your work, that’s kind of your main cauldron that you’re stirring and stirring. How did that appear in your practice?

AL: I’ve been grappling with it since probably my bachelor’s. Back then, I was creating pieces with doors and called them ‘alternative realities’, like that piece with the door in the ground that opens into a toilet. At some point, one of the tutors mentioned liminality to me.

DL: Was that the first time you heard that term?

AL: Yeah, but I didn’t immediately jump on it. It kept floating around me.

DL: Why not?

AL: I think it was quite popular at the time, but now I’m just way too deep into it.

DL: (Laughs) At this point, the trend-hoppers have moved on and only the real ones remain.

AL: Liminal is a very liminal term. I wrote my master’s thesis on it and I spent quite a long time learning the etymology and origin. It was coined relatively recently by this ethnographer, Arnold van Gennep. He was looking into different societies, especially, rural societies, and the ‘liminal’ in his head were stages to rituals. The way he conceptualises it is that in a ritual, you have the pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal. The liminal is when you go into a space in which societal rules are upheaved and you’re allowed to change and come back to society in this newfound form. What’s interesting is that he also spent some time talking about people who stay in the liminal being a dangerous zone because you can get lost there. In many ways, what he thinks are liminal personas are queer people, or people not living according to the normative rules of society.

DL: So is he saying that we’re lost?

AL: Yeah, essentially.

DL: But in this kind of condescending way? Is he an ally?

AL: I think he was talking very vaguely about it, which is also why liminality has such wishy-washy terminology. Let’s say marriage is a ritual, and between getting engaged and getting married is a liminal space, but the outcome is pretty fucking clear to me. (Laughs) It’s not that you’re changing societal rules when you’re engaged. I don’t really get where he was coming from, but the terminology he created was useful enough for me that I can continue elaborating it in my own terms philosophically. So it’s actually a state of being, but then architects and the internet decided what the liminal aesthetic looks like, which has nothing to do with where the word came from. It’s these empty, abandoned spaces; there are whole Reddit threads filled with them, which is also not what my work is about. I analysed these different ways of conceptualising the liminal and then created my own thing where I wanted it to be a space of dwelling. My master’s thesis was all about the liminal as a space of resistance because it’s supposed to be a transitional space, but what if you stay and live in it? Why can’t we live in the liminal? It’s a state of being but can also be a physical space. This is the way I conceptualised Ubiškės3.

They inform me that currently at their grandma’s, an initiative from Kaunas Artist House is using several buildings on the land to develop a new queer musical, Vaivorykštės Miuziklas, which will premiere in autumn. Upon arrival, we will be treated to a work-in-progress showing. Having been a resident at the first edition of their residency programme, Ubiškės3, taking place in the same kaimas, it’s commendable how generous Ana is in sharing their resources with groups that oftentimes find themselves without a space, much less this idyll of meadows, lakes and wooden houses, where the crackling of campfire, smell of šašlykai, laughter and bottles of wine from forgotten number of nights ago mix into what can only be described as a queertopia.

DL: Given how much we’ve discussed liminality, normativity and identity, is your work autobiographical, despite not being immediately identifiable in that way?

AL: There’s a beautiful word in German, jein. It’s a mix between ja and nein. I create these compositional visions and because of the way the art world functions, I need to use words to contextualise them, and eventually it all comes together, but it’s not a linear process. Being who I am, my very liminal identity as a queer, non-binary person with ADHD—that’s what drew me to the liminal. I realised very early on the idea of belonging to a lot of things at once is unacceptable to most people. You can contain multitudes, but they’re often incomprehensible to others. In the same way, these liminal spaces I create are a way of translating this idea of multitudes into space. If you can exist in these liminalities in prolonged ways, maybe you can understand how other people can be liminal and contain multitudes of identities within themselves. Like the leaves falling out of the ventilation system in Rupert, correlating the decay of the building with the seasonal decay of leaves. Then you have this out-of-season aspect, this queerness, where it’s snowing outside but the leaves are falling inside. I love having incongruence and dissonance between what you think you ought to see and what you’re seeing.

DL: That reminds me of practical magic, where it’s always better if you don’t know the secret of how it was done, letting you believe that it could actually be magic. When you understand there’s a string or a mechanism, it kind of ruins the trick. When people ask you how you did it, do you keep your secrets to yourself and follow the Magician’s Code?

AL: I wish I could, but I just love to talk. I’m not a mysterious, aloof person. Also, it’s usually such a feat to accomplish, and I want to tell people about it.

DL: Don’t you think it lessens the impact? Then it becomes real, it stops being something more-than-real, containing so many possibilities. Isn’t that why you love sci-fi?

AL: Yeah, but I want sci-fi to become reality; for the unreal to become real. It is something of this world, it didn’t just manifest itself.

DL: Isn’t that thing existing and the feeling it generates in the viewer enough inspiration?

AL: I don’t usually sit in the pub and tell every person or broadcast it online. I tell a few people, but it’s not common knowledge. It’s also sometimes so insane that when you explain it to someone, it goes into one ear and comes out the other.

DL: Well, communicating liminality in language is difficult, and you have to break it to do so. But when you see objects, like in your work, it’s so immediate and snaps you out of your own reality, opening you up to new potentialities.

AL: I think my work has an aspect of absurdity and playfulness that comes from seeing something unexpected.

DL: So how is this going to manifest in this exhibition? You’re bringing the sky inside?

AL: In a way, for sure. This is my first solo show. The way I create work doesn’t usually lend itself to white cube spaces because a lot of the time, this manifestation of the unreal into reality comes from the spaces being real, having a lot of history and context, and then I change an aspect inside of it. With this exhibition, I’m trying to transform a white cube space which is a first for me. I’m putting a giant half dome inside the space that’s 3.4 metres tall, made out of metal and covered with a tent… I think it’s also the first time I’m creating every element of the environment myself, even down to the smell, which I made in collaboration with Emilija Povilanskaitė.

DL: What feeling do you want people to walk away from the exhibition with?

AL: Maybe being a bit unsettled, feeling as if you’ve stared into the abyss.

DL: Because that’s how you felt driving back to your grandma’s that time?

AL: Yes, but… I don’t want to tell people how they should feel.

DL: So let me ask the question from the other side—what do you want the work to say?

AL: One of the things that will be part of this exhibition is Ursula K. Le Guin’s text ‘The Carrier Bag of Fiction’, which I’ve had translated into Lithuanian. In the text, Le Guin takes this creation story of the male, mammoth hunters who have brought back all this flesh, and you have this ‘provider’ or ‘hero’ storyline that stems from conceptualising hunter-gatherer life in a specific way, which is not necessarily true. There has been a scientific paper that broke that myth, but that doesn’t mean that the myth has been broken. There are these narratives that are prevalent in our heads that are not actually true.

DL: Well, people pick the narrative that suits their needs best. None of us will be able to know what it was actually like back then; we can just theorise. In the same way, you’re picking a certain theory that aligns more with your worldview, people who benefit from a patriarchal, very gendered way of being pick another theory, because it suits theirs. Neither of you are right. It’s also more about what these narratives say about the present, because when we talk about history and narratives of the past, they’re normally never about the past, but the present and future.

AL: I don’t want to ask people to believe in a specific narrative, I just want a baseline understanding that these narratives aren’t better or worse than each other, and that they can co-exist. Reality is relative and maybe we all just need to chill. (Laughs)