Building M, 2024
site-specific installation; a recycled disused building of a thermal power plant
M-1 “Klaipėdos energija” site, Danės g. 8
This industrial building, one of the disused buildings of the old Klaipėda thermal power plant, was simply begging to be recycled into a letter. One would like to hope that, turned into an M, it will become a new urban landmark of Klaipėda and a venue for all kinds of art and cultural events.
M stands not only for miestas (city), but also for menas (art), mokslas (science), mitas (myth), meilė (love) and, finally, metaphor. This city already has a K-shaped building (Klaipėda); now an M-shaped building (Memel) joins it, and, as we know, K + M = KM (karšta meilė – hot love between different cultural traditions).
Paulina Pukytė
A Circle That Is Not Round, 2024
found situation
M-11 Žvejų g. 16
Klaipėda has the Old Ferry across the lagoon, and something older still – the River Port passenger terminal surviving on the left bank of the Danė, which for a long time served as the jetty building for the ferries to Smiltynė. This elegant early-modernist structure (1961, architect Albinas Čepys) was most probably built to a standard design, only slightly modernised by its author. Its striking feature is the round windows – portholes – inherited from interwar streamline moderne and art deco, when the style of transatlantic liners was much admired. Such circles were a favourite in port and seaside architecture. The circle is the most perfect, most fundamental, most efficient, simplest, most symbolic, most magical and strongest geometric form – yet one of them here has turned into an oval. To squeeze an architectural circle into an oval takes a powerful force. Here it means only one thing – collapse.
Paulina Pukytė, Marija Drėmaitė
Paulina Eglė Pukytė – artist, writer, curator, critic, cultural commentator and lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She creates site-specific installations, interventions in public spaces, conceptual projects, moving image and video-text performances. In her interdisciplinary practice, drawing on various strategies of appropriation and recycling, on text, irony and the absurd, Paulina Pukytė deconstructs socio-ideological myths and socio-cultural clichés and explores the collisions between memory and history, inertia and freedom of choice, participation and manipulation. She is an active participant in the discourse on commemoration, and in 2017 she curated the 11th Kaunas Biennial – an international project and exhibition of site-specific installations in public spaces, “There and Not There: The (Im)possibility of a Monument”, about the monument as a phenomenon, the problems of the contemporary monument and alternatives to commemoration.