Robertas Narkus at Editorial

Artist: Robertas Narkus

Exhibition title: Sphynx

Venue: Editorial, Vilnius, Lithuania

Date: February 3 – March 3, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Editorial, Vilnius

In the summer I spent a few months in Liverpool, such a strange city, searching for hope, having once seen its own golden age and been the richest harbour in the United Kingdom, and, by the way

– the first and last registration point for the Titanic. Today, in Liverpool, the spirit of co-working and start-ups is strongly stimulated, however, most of these spaces are empty and the promise of a better future keeps getting delayed. I stayed in a skyscraper, twenty-first floor, the apartment of an American composer and his wife, an author, from which you could see a wonderful view, cruise ships passing by once in a while, and the city’s plans for the future.

I enjoyed walking around the district of former docks, but most of all I liked hanging around the parking lot of an abandoned shopping centre. On my first time there I was welcomed by savage street kids from the nearby trailer park community. After realizing that I am a foreigner, they prompted me to say in Liverpoolian – “I am a sausage” – pulling out a phone with the intention to film it. I felt alien and naive, and remembered my childhood in Justiniškės. We did not bond at all. Screw them. They don’t know yet that after I leave, bulldozers will not take long to come, destroy their sheds, and this will be a hub of creative industries.

The lot was cosy, surrounded by overgrown and jungle-like hedges, which protected it from the noise of a street stretching nearby. Scattered around were shopping trolleys, various appliances, a toilet bowl, a one-meter wide replica of a compass, sneakers. But the longest shadow was cast on the lot by an outdoor billboard growing out from the fence. For years, constantly changing advertising campaigns were layered on it, but sometimes those layers had to be peeled off and everything began anew. And the old banners, torn up like ill-meaning photographs, could be abandoned in the bushes, which is exactly where I found them. I piled them up in one of the trolleys, pushed it back home, called up a courier discovered through adverts, however, a bus with tinted windows rolled up, which, alongside with things, was taking home my exhausted countrymen.

In Vilnius, I spread these shreds on the floor of my study and took a paper knife to them, cutting out figures possibly resembling drawings of Egyptian pyramids which I have not seen, since when I was in Egypt many years ago we were filming an advertisement and I spent almost all of my time in the hotel.