the meeting, 2012

“The Meeting”, 2012, experimental documentary, 26 min.

The film takes the viewer to the Kaliningrad region, and presents the artist’s correspondence with a female resident of the same age from the town of Svetlogorsk, who is seeking new acquaintances on the Internet. The author uses a male name (and her husband’s identity mixed up with her own), and does not disclose to her correspondent that this is part of an art project.

In this way, the author attempts to get an insight into another woman’s world, and to see if she will open up her heart to a rather reserved man from neighbouring Lithuania, who writes to her that Svetlogorsk is the town of his childhood memories. He (she) spent his summer holidays with his (her) parents there, and an impressive seafront lift with an observation desk was the screen on to which his childhood dreams were projected.

Mutations of identity: intimate revelations between a man and a woman, and, at the same time, a woman and a woman, are combined metaphorically with the ambiguous situation of the Svetlogorsk seafront lift itself. It is a huge and imposing construction, which was facing destruction from the effects of erosion. The film reveals how the lift and the associated story of correspondence capture the junction of utopia and dystopia. This construction was dismantled soon after the film was produced.

Photograph by artnews.lt