They said it’s very beautiful here

People travel, parcels are posted, stories spread, the wish to escape and remember lingers. Various environments so often become backgrounds for these experiences with the help of and through photographs, films, postcards, video games, paintings, diary entries, and memories. The unnamed backgrounds are conducive to fantasies and desires. In turn, extractivist human-nonhuman relations make room for these desires to gain fenced, calculated and profitable shapes. Particular areas of earth become marked territories without considerations of ecological consequences. What the consequences of these extractivist relations expose is the issue of borders and how bodies and places deeply affect each other.

‘They said it’s very beautiful here’ starts with Ieva Kotryna Ski’s Sinkhole (2021). Tracing Ski’s grandfather’s engagement with the geology of sinkholes, it reflects on the fantasies and desires projected into the underworld. A sinkhole, an underworld surprise gifted to those above the surface, becomes a rift in the spatial perception of boundaries. In Walking on a Sleeping Elk (Maryna Makarenko, 2020), stalkers challenge the boundedness of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Threads of the great outdoors untouched by human activity, radiation measurements, and gendered rites of passage merge into a meditation of exposed bodies and places extending into one another. In A CROSSING (1698/2003) (2022), Emilia Beatriz’s vision merges with Kiera Coward-Deyell’s sounds and Andrés Nieves’ archival footage to tell a story about bodies, land and resistance. Scotland’s attempt to colonize Vieques, an island in present-day Puerto Rico, intertwines with instances of militarised land use and locally-sparked transnational struggle against it. How can we grieve the vulnerabilities of bodies and places while also embracing them as possibilities for coming together?

This event is ticketed on a pay what you can scale. Half of the money collected through the tickets will be donated in equal parts to charities supporting people affected by the war in Ukraine & the genocide in Palestine.

The project is funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Curated by Julija Šilytė & Milda Valiulytė

Collective Dreaming

Collective Dreaming is a research and events programme that weaves together Scottish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian moving images and thoughts in search of connection and collective liberation. In solidarity against all forms of colonial violence, the programme aims to question imperial, capitalist, and patriarchal systems of power to make sense of our current reality. In this context, we look at art as a method to open ourselves up to new possibilities of thinking, hoping, dreaming and collaborating.