You’re in a gargantuan depot. There’s a device you want. You discover it simply primarily based on the instructions above the cabinets. As quickly as you seize it you’re feeling it wants one other object to be full. But it surely doesn’t cease with the invention of the second factor. Earlier than you already know it, you have already got an entire trolley full of helpful issues. But how helpful? And for what? You might want to make them make sense.

The narrator within the video is reminiscing concerning the early Nineties, when after the autumn of socialism constructing provides shops grew to become an enormous factor. They allowed wider entry to new instruments and supplies. Whereas the entire area was present process a terraforming course of adjusting to the market financial system, the person was provided a chance to take their destiny into their very own palms. In a tradition which grew out of shortages that generated self-design, this was a decisive step into one other realm. It shaped pioneers within the first days of untamed capitalism, like Augustinas Rakauskas, one of many richest folks within the nation, the proprietor of quite a few companies, resembling the primary DIY retailer Kesko Senukai, the buying malls MEGA and the Whale (Banginis), the Concord Park chain of SPA resorts, and the proprietor of Information Radio (Žinių Radijas), who has additionally self-published three books describing his non secular educating. The concepts, symbols and values of this one-man self-religion are utilized all through all the companies, of their company constructions, aesthetics, work ethic and even merchandise placement. The deep roots in Protestant ethics, late-Soviet esoteric influences, and up to date blends of nationalism, capitalism and Christianity join it to the finality of salvation. Is DIY a secular ideology which, similar to liberalism, turns into a metaphor for deliverance?

Anastasia Sosunova information a motion which could recommend that there are deeper, legendary patterns concerned in visiting these temples. An etched picture on zinc contained in the set up, paraphrasing a uncommon Christian canon of depicting Christ tortured with all of the instruments laid round him, represents the instruments that one is forbidden to work with on Sunday. It’s one other reference to the enmeshment of faith and work. The tortured flesh is in reality the item right here, whereas all kinds of devices are getting company: they turn out to be components of the story of salvation. What’s the distinction between that picture and {a photograph} of a shelf with instruments on a wall in a preppers’ shelter? They’re the identical image.

Sosunova traces the uncanny relationship between a enterprise operation and a faith of 1. This coupling of a sequence of DIY shops and a non secular system appears to be like unlikely solely at first look. The notes and fragments kind a robust bond between these spheres, as above and under. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would see this as fertile floor for the paranoid studying to settle. As quickly as one realises the profound nature of that relationship, one is struck by the truth that the instruments bought within the depot had been made with a purpose to provide which means in an in any other case chaotic world. The individualistic side of DIY is mirrored in the truth that the Senukai cult by no means attracted any followers, the institutional faith options just one individual, the founding father. Self-made and self-designed people bask in their very own personal cults in their very own personal shelters. These are their areas of salvation.

The video is the first narrative ingredient of the exhibition. The customer may get the impression of overhearing fragments of a non-public journal from a street journey. We see the protagonists exhibiting up in numerous areas linked with the Senukai empire. They’re consistently exhibiting up within the background. Delicate tensions between the visuals and the spoken narration drive us to give attention to the margins of the picture, not the centre occupied by the heroines. The anecdotal is ready right here in opposition to the epic system, which all the time positions itself as central and doesn’t tolerate the skin. The journey is a ritual, which is topographically divided into two components, and the heroines search initiation and data. Their journey is associative, and therefore open to the sudden. In any case, one can keep away from paranoia by way of reparative studying. Sedgwick advises us to “give up the realizing, anxious paranoid willpower that no horror, nevertheless apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it could appear lifelike and essential to expertise shock.”¹ The stress between these two forms of studying are staged by the stress between the video and the monumental wheels positioned within the house. They maintain the proper epitome of paranoia, two surveillance cameras. It’s a reliquary, holding and defending two eyes. These objects safe the sacred physique of the faith of 1 and its founding narrative. A perpetual loop of illustration of the self-designed. This textual content started with the crucial of creating sense of a trolley stuffed with instruments. The reason being clear. They need to be used for constructing a shelf that can be used to retailer them. They are going to be saved.

—Daniel Muzyczuk

at Editorial, Vilnius
till December 2, 2023