“Who the hell knows what’s coming next?” My trip to a rural Lithuanian art farm

Flying to Vilnius, en route to a mysterious art event in the Lithuanian countryside, I began to relate to the post-Soviet urge to hoard objects. I was sitting in the first row – a bittersweet space where, in exchange for extra legroom, you must forfeit nearly all belongings to the overhead compartments. It was raw-dogging lite, and the lack of immediate access to all the little unnecessary items I’d stuffed into an illegally overweight backpack gave me a pang of anxiety. This yearning for stuff – my stuff – only lasted the brief 50-minute flight time, but it was a fitting amuse-bouche to the trip.

I’d been invited on a press trip to Lithuania to attend the debut of ‘Ferma’, a small exhibition of works by famed Lithuanian fiction writer and artist Gabija Grušaitė, staged inside the agricultural warehouse-turned-artist studio of her father, Marius, and led by curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, whose extensive work with Lithuanian filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas had given them a strong link to the Baltic country. Pitched as an “invitation to a reunion. PTSD REUNION,” the event was framed around Gabija’s return to her father’s artistic den, where the ghosts of Lithuania’s 51 years of Soviet occupation have been excised through Marius’ many artworks and objects. It was only 35 years ago, on March 11, 1990, that the country became the first to declare independence from the Soviet Union; in these ensuing years, Lithuanians have built a new national identity from the ground up as its citizens and artists have grappled with both the freedom and trauma of their transition into democracy after decades of oppression.

‘Ferma’ came wrapped in the legacy of Fluxus – an art movement partially founded by Lithuanian-American artist George Mačiūnas that centered on the idea that art can be anywhere and belong to anyone. “Working with Mekas, we always saw Fluxus as a movement that wanted to bring art outside the institution,” the curators note days later, from the comfort of an upscale hotel lobby. With ‘Ferma’, it was “very interesting to see the relationship with the audience and the public. Seeing what happens when art is directly confronted with no meditation in a normal place.” Freed from the white walls of a typical gallery space, the event tapped into this Fluxus spirit through a collective journey to the “realness” of this remote countryside warehouse; it was part supercharged studio visit, part art world field trip. Central to the event was Gabija’s titular two-channel video installation, filmed inside her father’s studio, plus an accompanying room-sized chalk drawing memorialising many summers spent on the farm. But, most intriguingly, it also offered an opportunity to wander through the organised chaos of Marius’ inner artistic sanctum alongside a gaggle of art world strangers.

The gaggle numbered over a hundred people. We were herded onto multiple shuttle buses and driven over an hour to the village of Sariai (population: around 200). I found myself on Bus #1, seated next to the fabulously dressed director of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Solvita Krese, and surrounded by a who’s who of Baltic culture.

After signing safety waivers warning us against impaling ourselves on rusty nails, we arrived at the farm. A friendly, bespectacled man (who I assumed to be hired for the event) told Bus #1 about the history of the word “ferma”. Besides literally meaning “farm” in Lithuanian, it was also used to describe Soviet-era collective farms, which now elicited negative memories for those old enough to remember that period in the country’s history. It was under the Communist Party that agriculture was collectivised by the state, forcing independent farmers into large, state-controlled units through coercion and repression. It was this process that brought farm workers to Sariai, where dairy production was the main industry, and it was through this process that Marius would eventually buy the abandoned dairy farm in the 1990s that became his studio.

These layers of context and history also extended to the man telling us the village lore. In a way, he was part of the team helping organise the event, but he was also Justas Janauskas – Gabija’s husband and manager, and also co-founder of the five billion dollar Lithuanian company Vinted.’ I was told this key fact much later while standing in his beautiful, sprawling flat during a Friday evening dinner party; one day after the bus back to Vilnius, during which I talked incessantly about my latest Vinted bartering drama as he sat within earshot.

After a short walk up to the farm, I stepped into the warehouse’s first room, where Gabija’s chalk-drawn map of the surrounding area, marked with memories and landmarks that shaped her upbringing as she and her family navigated the chaos, and freedom that the Soviet Union’s collapse had on their homeland. The work also served as a quiet introduction to the project’s cross-generational story – and an intentional rebuffing of the permanence of her father’s collecting. As she later explained to me, “My drive was mapping these [memories]. It’s something that people walk over. It’s very temporary. It’s going to be erased very soon, and for me, it’s like a clean slate with the realm of objects.”

There were images depicting the woods north of the village, featuring “the mushrooms, the fungi, the darkness, and all the different things that Lithuanians associate with that space,” and a lake to the east – a reference, in part, to a family boat stolen in 1997. The village portion of her map was dedicated to the “dark and scary” journey she’d have to make as a child when she was sent to pick up milk, marking the saw mill, the ruins of an unused Soviet school, and other “territories” she had to pass on her dairy run.

The sparseness of the room offered a pared-down appetiser before a narrow hallway led guests into the overstimulating visual feast of Marius’ many, many objects. As my brain adjusted to the sheer amount of stuff in all directions, my immediate comparison went to Christoph Büchel’s equally overwhelming ‘Monte di Pietà’, a show staged last year at Fondazione Prada in Venice. I was not alone in this observation. “As you can see, it’s not a Christoph Büchel installation. This is a real space,” co-curator Francesco Ragazzi noted in his introduction. “It’s not about representation. It’s about elaboration or rumination on heritage.” And ruminate, I did.

On opposite ends of the warehouse, Gabija’s film played on the walls via massive, mounted projectors that looked pricier than my student loan balance. ‘Ferma’ sees a roving camera glide around the studio as Gabija narrates the story of her father, the farm, and the Lithuanian legacy entombed within its walls. “I always hated this place. Large and cold, filled with layers of history that my father refuses to let go. However, now, I can finally see the value of creating art in a site of trauma – an archive of both objects and memories,” she says early in the narrative. As a clock ticks methodically in the background like a lost track from the Dunkirk score, history lurches forward as she shifts focus to the new threat facing her nation, and her generation: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the Belarus border just a few kilometres away, “the sound of drones enters collective nightmares.”

It’s this seemingly vast schism between generations that fills up the space just as much as her father’s objects; Gabija was born in 1987, three years before Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. She holds no memories of the moment, yet its history has left an indelible mark. “Imagine growing up in the 1990s, and there was no infrastructure. It had to be built. In a way, it [offered] a sense of freedom, but there was also so much weight from the past,” she told me. “When I think about how we experienced trauma without living it, the way we lived it was through seeing our parents’ fears and that kind of chaos. Uncertainty is embedded in the blood.”

Fully enveloping myself in the film, there’s a moment of disorientation. As I weaved through the warehouse, I noticed small gnome statues, ancient framed paintings propped up by overstuffed trash bags, and plaster-made men sunken into sculptural reliefs. I also noticed a structure set in the middle of the space that towered over everything and can only be described as a Big Cheese Cube, thanks to the off-yellow spray foam insulation covering it. As I approached it, hypnotised, I ran into Marius himself holding court with a large glass of red wine. The structure is his winter chamber, an inner studio inside the studio that actually stays warm (the warehouse is draughty, with large sections of the roof split open and exposed to the elements).

Inside was a small sleeping cot, a desk, a microwave, and a fireplace. The scraps of a months-old project casting moulds sitting in a corner, while nearby, he stacked frames of paintings not by him or Gabija, but by his father – another artist in their lineage. If the entire warehouse felt like walking through his brain, it’s this inner compartment that felt closest to his soul. “To be frank, for me, this is enough,” he says. “All the rooms, the kitchen, it’s for [my] wife and family.” As we moved out of the small room and shuffled over to another section of his studio, a man who looked dressed for the Kentucky Derby leaned in and asked Marius if he liked this archive of objects he’s built. “I live here. It’s part of me. You can’t like yourself.”

All of these things aren’t just possible inspiration for his next project; they’re a living monument to his endurance as both an artist and Lithuanian. It’s a form of preservation – though, he admits, “I throw a lot away.” Another form of preservation comes via food. Among the chalk drawings, Gabija included objects connected to perishable goods like salt containers and pickle jars. As the night wore on, homemade delicacies became central to the gathering. The dinner buffet in the meadow featured a variety of jams from locally sourced ingredients, while a drinks table offered moonshine shots; I took one and felt the fire of a thousand suns in me. I fear I’m still recovering.

Leaving the farm after sunset amid a haze of mosquitoes unfettered by my frenzied chainsmoking (I had been told a lie that it would repel them), my thoughts turned to how ‘Ferma’ fitted into the new narrative emerging in the Baltic art scene. As I’d discover over the course of a dizzying two-day press circuit spent zig-zagging through galleries and institutions around Vilnius, there was a refreshing wildness to the city’s art scene. I met with Pakui Hardware, the artist duo whose kinetic sculptures defined the Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th Venice Biennale. I ventured into an underground labyrinth in the basement of the Meduza project space to see fossilised sculptural works by Jankauskas-Duonis (whose 15-foot-tall statue of Tony Soprano dominated the Vilnius Train Station), and I navigated rows of barbed wire to see an incredible exhibition on Lithuanian rave culture staged inside a former prison that was operational from 1837 until 2019.

In a country like Lithuania, whose history is marked by uncertainty, the tension between the past and present is especially sharp. “People here are more daring,” says Gabija. “They have the courage to do things that, for others, would be too scary… You don’t know what tomorrow holds. You’re trying to be fully alive and savour the moment, because who the hell knows what’s coming next?”