One of the most exciting and outrageous pavilions at the 2019 Venice Biennale came from a rather surprising source – Lithuania, which till then had only occasionally caught the public eye when it came to the art world. When visitors stepped into the Lithuanian pavilion, they entered an entirely different world, one that was dappled in sunlight, a room full of sand and actual people lounging in beachwear with various holiday paraphernalia all around them.

But while it may seem quaint, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė’s Sun & Sea isn’t an escape from the stresses of everyday urban living – it is instead an urgent call for climate action, as we look down upon these beachgoers, as if we were the sun. Opening their voices to sing, we learn of each beachgoer’s stories, and their voices eventually come together to broach serious topics in a global symphony, addressing the climate emergency through the microcosm of the fatigue and finiteness of the human body as a metaphor of an exhausted Earth.

The exhibition clearly struck a chord, going on to win the prestigious Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Biennale, and has since gone on to tour the world, bringing more international interest in Lithuania and the work’s message, including this May to the 2024 Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). We spoke to artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė to find out more about the inspiration behind the work, Lithuania, and the end of the world. Read the interview in full below:

Bakchormeeboy: How did the three of you first come together as a group, especially considering you’d previously worked on 2013’s Have A Good Day! Opera? Considering how that was already such an unusual work, what was the process like of coming up with Sun & Sea? Whose idea was it, and what was it like to work together on contributing to the idea and eventually bringing it to life for the Venice Biennale?

Lina Lapelytė: We actually rarely work as a trio. We only made 2 works together and perhaps one of the reasons for that is that the trio work takes much more time compared to when we work on our own. Opera as Gesamkunstwerk – a total work of art – is where the text, music, visual and conceptual parts coexist as equal elements, therefore we also have to take our egos down to achieve the common goal. 

Vaiva Grainytė: Working in a trio entails lots of challenges, requires patience, and some extra time as every detail has to be conceptually questioned amongst the three authors. It’s like constantly living in a shared room with lots of brainstorming going on, however this dormitory mode is just a platform allowing us to meet and discuss what was delivered in our personal bedrooms of text, music, and visuals. 

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė: Collaboration allows the complexity in the form of the work as we are bringing together different competencies. The advantage is the dialogue. And the challenge is the dialogue. 

While we were actively waiting for a new idea for trio work, I was working on a film, Acid Forest, where the birds watched the tourists coming to a viewing platform. An anthropological zoo situation and angle from above somehow influenced the initial image of a beach observed from above. In Sun & Sea, performers lie down to be in a frontal position for the audience. They sing their inner monologues in a relaxed mode (even though such bodily condition is against the recommended physics for singing). When they don’t sing, they are free to do what they want to. They are joined by local beachgoers in every new country we visit, bringing local habits on stage. The choir of colours is essential too. No towels and swimwear are very bright on this beach – as if holidaymakers have stayed in the sun for too long and are gradually fading. 

Lina: The starting point was to continue to work with voices that can represent different narratives, like in our previous work opera Have a Good Day! for the 10 cashiers, supermarket sounds and piano. Sun & Sea being a second collective work of ours, we were looking for a situation that would allow for different individuals, undressed from their social situation to coexist. Beach was a convincing place, which then proposed the two angles: the physical one being looked at from above, the sun’s perspective and the conceptual one – the climate change. However climate change is an easy shortcut description, the work itself touches upon many more subtle subject matters like body politics, inclusivity, domination and leisure.

Vaiva: To find the right tenor of the artistic expression: how to tackle the utterly important and global topic of a climate disaster in a gentle and light way. The setting is sunny, the music is poppy, the lyrics carry quotidian register and are both ironic and melancholic. The catastrophe is throbbing in the air instead of being exposed right into the face.

Rugilė: I think the most difficult part was making this piece for the first time, as apart from fundamental creative tasks, we were dealing with organisational challenges ourselves. It felt so complex that we didn’t know if it had a chance to be repeated. But we had a clear intuition that positioning it in the context of the Venice Biennale could be a perfect context for this piece. And it happened so. Venice became our cruise ship to the world.

Bakchormeeboy: Awards aren’t everything, but how did it feel when Sun & Sea won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale? Do you feel there is importance and recognising and validating art and artists? Are there better alternatives than having a competitive aspect to it?

Lina: I don’t feel that Venice Biennale is a competitive place – already being there means a lot – recognition and support from your own country. I don’t think (I hope!) that anyone goes to win there – the possibility of that equals to 0. At the moment we received the award I don’t think any of us felt anything at all, we were so exhausted from delivering the work, making it happen. Now as time passes by, we realise that the winning did change a lot of things for us – Sun & Sea still resonates in people’s memory and therefore people know and remember us. It is a privilege that we try to understand and have to appreciate.

Rugilė: Indeed, competitions and prizes are the funny games people play. The recognition adds visibility to the piece and maybe saves some time for potential audiences who base their choices were to spend time based on other people’s choices. However, there are so many beautiful works that have not been nominated anywhere and are so much worth discovering! The story of Sun & Sea was a chain of lucky coincidences. It is a complex piece with a complicated infrastructure, so it felt that it could have easily entered the void after the premiere. The lesson learned with both of our trio works is that it is not enough to deliver good work – it matters so much what you do with it next!

Bakchormeeboy: Your art often involves ordinary people as performers in the work itself. What is the basis for this involvement, and what is the curation process like that goes into selecting these volunteers and performers?

Vaiva: I was immersed in a research – reading various ecology and climate crisis related stuff. Simultaneously 3 of us were searching for singing performers. The singer with a low voice inspired the character of an exhausted Workaholic – it has a strong autobiographical emotion in it. The couple, who found each other because of a volcano eruption, is based on my friend’s love story. Meeting twin girls reminded me of 3D printers used by scientists to restore the diminishing Coral Reef. The lady who came to auditions with her shy boy, and was holding his hand all the time, inspired the Wealthy Mummy’s song, which turned into a humorous comment on consumerism, etc. 

It was a very intense process associatively weaving theoretical knowledge with personal experience and being all ears during auditions, observing people. The idea was to transmit this complicated topic into little stories, told from the “I” perspective.

Lina: Music was as much inspired by the text as by the singers that came to audition for us. We first created the content based on the people we met and only later on it turned into a fixed score and narrative. For me the choir parts are the most important elements of Sun & Sea as they reflect the coexistence, the shared voice, which is exactly what matters in the climate crisis.

Our touring performers are an international group of singers that we discovered throughout the time. More than half of the cast is from the original group of performers from Vilnius that we worked with from the very beginning and for whom the specific roles/songs were written. 

Rugilė: While touring with Sun & Sea, we try to adapt the piece to the local contexts. We always invite volunteers and local choir members, who naturally bring their beach-going traditions to our work. You can always see some site-specific games and local food and hear a line in the official language where the sunscreen instruction is sung. If there is a natural beach in the city, we also try to find real role players. For example, we have invited an illegal beach merchant in Athens, a man with a metal detector in NYC, and a surfer in LA. Some contexts are more complicated than others, so we put more extensive efforts into the adaptation. For example, recently, our beach was joined by a soloist, who sang some libretto parts in Arabic, which became a complex reference to a war context. I guess we try to ensure that on Sun & Sea beach, the place is given to different members of society, even the ones who live “offshore” of attention.

Bakchormeeboy: Based on this article in The Guardian, it seems the Lithuanian arts scene was quite a difficult place to be in, in terms of how much support and attention it receives. Especially considering how Sun & Sea put Lithuania on the world map, how much have things changed since then? Is there more optimism these days, especially when it comes to policies, infrastructure, or the public interest in art?  

Lina: Being from a very small country, also being artists that are not represented by big galleries and participating in Venice Biennale was a big challenge. This meant that our pavilion was in the outskirts of the main art hub of the Biennale, our communication was limited to our small team and humble budgets. Indeed, during the first day of the pre-opening, the ‘press day’,  we had very few visitors – we told our singers this is how it will be all the time, that there is always going to be more singers than the audience. But being in Venice, representing the country, being trusted by the local authorities, surrounded by beautiful and loving performers was already a huge achievement.  And during the next few days everything flipped over, already before the lion landed into our hands, people were wondering around Venice looking for the ‘Lithuania’ – the queues only stopped forming after the last show – 5 months of running the performance twice a week for 9 hours a day…The trust in DIY spirit brought us as far – therefore it contributes to the believe that there must be some kind of hope somewhere…

Bakchormeeboy: As artists tackling such big issues as capitalism and climate change, how effective do you feel art is as a way of creating change or starting conversations, especially with such a limited audience, or the high barrier to entry, such as touring costs for artists, or ticket prices for audiences? Is it precisely that it ends up targeting a certain more wealthy or powerful group that you hope your art will inspire them to do something about it?

Vaiva: I think it would be too arrogant to think that art – or our piece – can make any big changes in the world. However, it has the potential to have an effect on a personal, that is to say – micro/inner level. Yet we don’t expect emotionally triggered viewer to become a converter or take some social actions. Just perhaps every single minute of climate crisis awareness counts.

Rugilė: We had many discussions among ourselves about what our responsibilities are. We sing about climate change, but at the same time, we must travel to do that, so we generate extra emissions in the real world. We have formed a choir where everyone’s voice counts as equal and implemented non-hierarchical working methods in our artistic practice. We hope performance may activate, trigger and inspire some mindset shifts, but whether it can grow into a social change – is out of our control. Sun & Sea stays in the comfort zone of the art. 

Bakchormeeboy: Sun & Sea deals with mini-dramas that expand into bigger dramas and world-affecting issues. Do you think it is difficult for people to see the bigger picture when they’re often caught up in their own problems?

Vaiva: It is easier to convey the macrocosm through a microcosm, while earthly and individual experiences provide opportunities to grasp major problems. Capitalism, ecology and other related subjects are very broad topics that are heavily exploited. This can cause a kind of ‘allergy’, in which it is very easy to drown or become bored and apathetic. You can influence discussions about global events emotionally or intellectually with a simple narrative, a fragment of this whole macro.

Rugilė: The structural choices of Sun & Sea touch not just the relation between micro and macro but are also in sync with the fragmented way most of us interact as members of society today. For example, do you know how many of your hundreds/thousands of Facebook friends are married or have children? The same here: we still need characters and someone to listen to, but a bit of their thoughts is enough – we can go on to the next character. As both our pieces were meant to mirror society, our fragmented senses were essential when determining the mosaic structure of the piece. 

Bakchormeeboy: How hopeful do you feel towards climate change and us being able to counter or at least slow it down?

Vaiva Grainytė: I think slowing down is a long and gradual process, rather than a one night revolution, miracle or some smart solution. Going downhill operates much faster and on a larger scale than the opposite force of green actions or conscious daily actions. But it’s important to keep doing little things which might sprout up in the soil of catastrophe, and to support the new beginning. 

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė: Ecology and economy, like a dog and a cat, do not coexist with each other, even in organic stores. Probably, the economy won’t stop as long as consumption doesn’t stop. If it can slow down? Capitalism is a driving force of so-called progress, so solutions are not coming from above. Meanwhile, individual effort is something like a drop in the sea. 

Bakchormeeboy: In line with SIFA’s theme of They Declare, who do you feel, more than ever, needs their voices amplified and heard?

Vaiva: The voice of forests, oceans, animals and plants, not to mention indigenous people, the voice of spirituality, empathy and queer. However, amplification itself is not enough.  Willingness to listen and to weave a respectful polylogue is more important than a higher volume left in deaf zone. 

Lina: Today, being surrounded by the wars of Ukraine and Gaza, I feel we need to be attentive not to only how to amplify the voices of those who suffer but also be conscious about our choices and how they support these wars. 

Rugilė: I couldn’t express myself better than what Vaiva and Lina said. Maybe I would only add our inner voices, intuition. 

Photo Credit: Andrej Vasilenko, Neon Realism and Evgenia Levin, courtesy of the artists

Sun & Sea plays from 30th May to 1st June 2024 at the Esplanade Theatre, as part of Singapore International Festival of Arts 2024. Tickets available here

SIFA 2024: They Declare runs from 17th May to 2nd June 2024 across various venues. Tickets and full programme available here