Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, Lina Lapelytė: Sun & Sea (Marina)

You’re back on the beach. You know it from the smell (salty-fishy), from the shifting ground, the murmur of conversations in the distance, the blinding light, the sea. A breeze that is just a breath, and a tiny, passing cloud between you and the sun. You look up. Airplane exhaust fumes criss-cross the blue. Maybe once upon a time you’d wave at them, all the way up there – but those lines, they are not water. Their story is not the story of water.

Now picture yourself somewhere in mid-air, light as a ghost, hovering a a few meters above it all. The lives beneath you blur into and out of view: towels, sun hats, sandwiches, cocktails, frisbees and flesh. You turn to look at the shoreline. And from the waves, you look up and out and onto sea and sky, and the horizon is so, so much further away from up here, but you don’t know it, or else you don’t notice, because all you see is blue, and in that blue there’s the story of everything, and just at that moment, the blue is too wide and too deep and too full to see anything else at all.

Sun & Sea (Marina), the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, is a durational opera-performance by filmmaker and director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, writer and poet Vaiva Grainytė and performance artist and musician Lina Lapelytė.

Vernissage week: May 8-12
Performance 10am-7pm

May 14-October 31
Installation Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-6pm
Performance every Saturday 10am-6pm

Location: Marina Militare, Calle de la Celestia (by Campo de la Celestia), Castello, 30122 Venezia (click here for a map)

On the occasion of the pavilion’s official opening on Friday, May 10 at 4pm, writer Daisy Hildyard presents the talk Four Billion Years on the Beach, a collective memory of the ocean, starting four billion years ago with the beginning of life, finishing in the near future, with detours on hermit crabs, childhood beach holidays, terminal illness and space botany. Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow (Jonathan Cape, 2013), received the Somerset Maugham Award and a “5 under 35” honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. She is currently working on a novel about nonhuman forms of life and her latest book, The Second Body (Fitzcarraldo, 2017), is an essay on the Anthropocene.

The event also marks the launch of a special-edition vinyl record and catalogue designed by Åbäke. The publication features essays and literary texts on the ecologies and mythologies of the sea by writer Marie Darrieussecq, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, writer Daisy Hildyard, writer and curator Monika Kalinauskaite and curator Lucia Pietroiusti. Working with and within the city, the vinyl/catalogue was printed in Venice at Grafiche Veneziane, and screenprinted at Malefatte – Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a co-operative run by inmates of the male prison of Santa Maria Maggiore, Venice.

Commissioner: Rasa Antanavičiūtė, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts. Curator: Lucia Pietroiusti, Curator of General Ecology at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Honorary Commissioner: Jean-Baptiste Joly, Founder of Akademie Schloss Solitude. Assistant Curator: Caterina Avataneo. Pavilion visual identity by Goda Budvytytė.

Presented by Lithuanian Council for Culture; Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania

Produced by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts; Neon Realism; The Momentary

Supported by Lewben Art Foundation; JCDecaux Lietuva; The Momentary
And the generosity of the Pavilion’s Supporters; Partners; Friends; Ambassadors and Media Partners

The vinyl and publication were supported by Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo; Danutė Mallart