Margarita Matulytė (Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Lithuanian National Museum of Art)
The memorable and recognisable “angles” of Vilnius have been created and embedded in cultural memory by Józef Czechowicz, Jan Bułhak, Algimantas Kunčius and other famous photographers. However, among these prominent figures who immortalized the capital, we do not find Algirdas Šeškus (born in 1945 in Vilnius), who never photographed Vilnius on purpose, yet mostly photographed in Vilnius. The Vilnius archive of the artist contains many images of the city’s everyday life, which in the Soviet era (and even today), did not correspond to the imagined identities of the capital.
In search for alternatives to the visual representation of Vilnius, the research draws on science fiction, China Miéville’s detective story The City & The City (2009), which was referred to by the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, attempting to understand how to see the world. In Miéville’s novel, two cities exist in one physical place, yet their inhabitants strive not to see each other’s—strange—cities. Mental and ideological differences create not only an invisible boundary but also border zones, crosshatched by intersecting socio-cultural interests, which Paul-Michel Foucault describes as heterotopias.
Šeškus created a parallel city, which the inhabitants of Vilnius, like the heroes in Miéville’s novel, were learning not to see. The gaze of Šeškus, who made his debut in 1980, was ignored by the traditionalists of the dominant Lithuanian school of photography. His work was viewed with the suspicion by the Soviet censors, as his photographs “resembled the attempts of a schoolchild just starting out in photography, trying to make a photograph for a family album.” The “dilettante,” “uninteresting” images are in dissonance with the representation of the city imagined and still propagated by various ideological powers. The photographs by Šeškus resemble the pages of a secret diary of the city, worth of reading, where one can move through the heterotopic territory, cross the “border” and see different Vilnius.