B_Tours Vilnius. Dystopia
Dystopia has long been a form for authors and artists to reflect about past and current social predicaments by articulating disturbing future scenarios. Today, with environmental precariousness, cultural and religious collisions and violent political and economic uprisings, dystopian fictions channel the anxiety of citizens around the world. As the nervous centres of global economic and political systems, cities, more than other human environments, are where these dystopias unfold.
‘Utopia, whether with a sign of plus or minus, always evolves around the city’, said Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis during the Architecture Fund talk in December 2014, ‘We should not believe in theorists who talk about utopia, dystopia or eutopia as if they happened in books, in literature. No, they happened in the city.’
Indeed, Vilnius has seen some of the ‘real’ dystopias. Perhaps the biggest of them is becoming increasingly less visible in the rapidly developing city centre, but can still be witnessed in the ‘sleeping districts’ surrounding it. It is these spaces where the utopia of everyone equal and united under communist ideals turned upside down and became a dystopia of what historian Tomas Vaiseta calls the ‘society of boredom’ – passive individuals losing any sense of meaning in the context of ideology they do not relate to, and feel unable to change.
Today, in contrast, the change is fast: geographical outlines, governing systems and demographics of the cities are shifting most abruptly and at higher rates than ever before. Cities are becoming more influential than nation states as large urban agglomerations connect by inexorable streams of information, capital and goods. But while this connectivity make cities a prolific source of innovation, inspiration and opportunity, it also breaks social relations and fragments societies. Digital technologies, a primary tool of this connectivity, increasingly serve the interests of their creators more than their users. Almost like the characters of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, we are becoming locked in the small enclosed worlds surrounded by screens; not aware of the sophisticated surveillance systems used to monitor our behaviour; unable to distinguish facts from tales in the blurring lights of new media journalism, PR and propaganda.
The same idea of global networks manifests in politics through power games that cause civil wars, mass displacement and economic migration. In this context, Lithuania’s articulations of fear are again based on the dystopian scenarios: a society that is dying (due to rapid aging caused by huge emigration) or a society at risk of losing its national identity (due to influx of immigration from the war-torn regions) – just like the one described in Michel Houellebecq’s near-future dystopian novel ‘Submission’.
If dystopia, as Donskis said, is inseparable from the city, then we can discover it not only through books, but in the same way we explore urban landscapes – through an act of walking, a touchstone of every B_Tour. What dystopian territories of Vilnius are prone for discoveries? How does the city look like in the context of global interconnectedness? What other dystopian scenarios can be relevant to the city, or the country, today? B_Tours Vilnius invites artists to imagine the dystopian future, focus on dystopias or repressed collective traumas of the past or look into the notion of dystopia antagonistically – by proposing positive alternatives instead.
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B_Tours Vilnius was a collaboration between the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, the Architecture Fund in Vilnius and B_Tour Berlin. We initiated a transdisciplinary exchange based on active spectatorship in contemporary public art and to creatively and collectively pave ways for reflecting on the environmental, social, economic and cultural challenges and opportunities emerging in urban settings. Subjects such as collective trauma and memory, resources and luxury, post-industrial economies, political self-determination, cultural identity, formal and informal economies, global mobility and urban ecology were scrutinized in participatory and inclusive manners.
‘Utopia, whether with a sign of plus or minus, always evolves around the city’, said Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis during the Architecture Fund talk in December 2014, ‘We should not believe in theorists who talk about utopia, dystopia or eutopia as if they happened in books, in literature. No, they happened in the city.’
Indeed, Vilnius has seen some of the ‘real’ dystopias. Perhaps the biggest of them is becoming increasingly less visible in the rapidly developing city centre, but can still be witnessed in the ‘sleeping districts’ surrounding it. It is these spaces where the utopia of everyone equal and united under communist ideals turned upside down and became a dystopia of what historian Tomas Vaiseta calls the ‘society of boredom’ – passive individuals losing any sense of meaning in the context of ideology they do not relate to, and feel unable to change.
Today, in contrast, the change is fast: geographical outlines, governing systems and demographics of the cities are shifting most abruptly and at higher rates than ever before. Cities are becoming more influential than nation states as large urban agglomerations connect by inexorable streams of information, capital and goods. But while this connectivity make cities a prolific source of innovation, inspiration and opportunity, it also breaks social relations and fragments societies. Digital technologies, a primary tool of this connectivity, increasingly serve the interests of their creators more than their users. Almost like the characters of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, we are becoming locked in the small enclosed worlds surrounded by screens; not aware of the sophisticated surveillance systems used to monitor our behaviour; unable to distinguish facts from tales in the blurring lights of new media journalism, PR and propaganda.
The same idea of global networks manifests in politics through power games that cause civil wars, mass displacement and economic migration. In this context, Lithuania’s articulations of fear are again based on the dystopian scenarios: a society that is dying (due to rapid aging caused by huge emigration) or a society at risk of losing its national identity (due to influx of immigration from the war-torn regions) – just like the one described in Michel Houellebecq’s near-future dystopian novel ‘Submission’.
If dystopia, as Donskis said, is inseparable from the city, then we can discover it not only through books, but in the same way we explore urban landscapes – through an act of walking, a touchstone of every B_Tour. What dystopian territories of Vilnius are prone for discoveries? How does the city look like in the context of global interconnectedness? What other dystopian scenarios can be relevant to the city, or the country, today? B_Tours Vilnius invites artists to imagine the dystopian future, focus on dystopias or repressed collective traumas of the past or look into the notion of dystopia antagonistically – by proposing positive alternatives instead.
***
B_Tours Vilnius was a collaboration between the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, the Architecture Fund in Vilnius and B_Tour Berlin. We initiated a transdisciplinary exchange based on active spectatorship in contemporary public art and to creatively and collectively pave ways for reflecting on the environmental, social, economic and cultural challenges and opportunities emerging in urban settings. Subjects such as collective trauma and memory, resources and luxury, post-industrial economies, political self-determination, cultural identity, formal and informal economies, global mobility and urban ecology were scrutinized in participatory and inclusive manners.