In 2012, a lake appeared suddenly outside of Likančiai, Lithuania. The body of water is fallout from a Soviet-era drainage project that sought to make land more suitable for agriculture. With the disrepair of the artificial system, water has started to accumulate and begun to emerge unexpectedly, creating accidental landscapes.
Reethaus presents a portrait of the surge. In SILT, a site-specific audiovisual installation by Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė, Iida Jonsson, and Ssi Saarinen, the landscape is explored by perspectives proper to the study and depiction of emergencies: first-person wandering documentation, forensic diving, and helicopter flyover.
Meandering around, across and beneath the surface of this alien upwelling, the artists insistently document the formal qualities of the new lake with an eerie, banausic faithfulness. The polyphonic soundtrack by Alexander Iezzi — like the landscape, never settling into any particular rhythm or harmony — lends reality to this latter-day natural feature. Audiences are pressed into a meditation on the restlessness of landscapes under contemporary conditions, asked to contemplate failed attempts to reform territory in accordance with human will.
This Berlin Art Week show of SILT will be the first time that Reethaus presents a video channel in its shrine to the sonic arts. The composition by Iezzi has been spatialized by MONOM for the Reethaus.
