Kastute

I live in the small village, Bajorai, in the north-east of Lithuania. Each morning, when I prepare my coffee and look through the kitchen window, I see a small piece of forest with a tiny wooden house. The house is uninhabited; nature is taking over and it is slowly being decomposed by humidity, fungi, and insects.

In 1990, less than a year before Lithuania gained its independence from Soviet Russia, Kastute died. She had lived through Czarist rule and the times of independence between the two World Wars; almost all of her life on this piece of land which she never owned. The father of her daughter went to work to America in the 1930s. He promised to return with money, but he never did. Back then, together with her daughter, she lived in a semi-derelict clay hut. But in one summer, she managed to sell enough hazelnuts to afford a used smoke sauna (at the time, it was not uncommon to transport whole buildings from one place to another) and she turned it into her home, even built the chimney herself.

When the authorities demanded she work in a collective farm, she refused. She told them, 'If I’m an obstacle to you, you can dig a hole in front of my door and I will vanish.' As a punishment, she was never allowed an electricity connection to her house. The archival photo from the village is the only photo known to me that shows Kastute. (She is in the third row from up, the third from left.) The slides with text scratchings are quotes from people who knew Kastute (66 in total), the colour slides are photographs from the nature surrounding the house. (80 in total)

The last slide is projected by a soviet built projector, reflected from a mirror found in Kastute's house. (The picture is AI generated with a text of a quote from Kastute. A photograph from the ruins of the collective farm from Bajorai, functioned as alignment for the generated picture)

The project was partly funded with an artist scholarship by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

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