Reading could be a solitary, intimate, internalized practice but also a collective experience of sharing and thought: standing at the core of Gawȩda and Kulbokaitė artistic practice, the reading group underline the potential of art-making to evoke the unheard and unseen through voicing and performative engagement.

Currently based in Basel, Gawęda (PL) and Kulbokaitė (LT) begin their collaborative research just after graduating at Royal College of Arts in London in 2013, with the on-going project Young Girl Reading Group: started as a Facebook group for collective sharing of beloved texts through IRL gatherings at the artists’ flat, it continued to expand through the years as a nomadic appointment in art institutions, a practice in which reading out loud becomes performative engagement for voicing and questioning. Named after by Tiqqun’s “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl” (1999), within YGRG the performers read out loud queer and feminist theory, poetry, sci-fi narrative and ecology critique, their faces enlighten by the cold light of the cellphones screens while moving in both physical and virtual spaces with cameras recording their unpredictable gestures.

Bringing on a complexity of practices composed of performances, video productions, sculptures, scents, sounds and paintings, Gawȩda and Kulbokaitė are looking beyond the inwardly contemplative dimension of art practice, involving the audience in unexpected shared experiences. With their latest project Mouthless, Gawȩda and Kulbokaitė deepen the concept of the reading group through polyphonic chants and conjuring: looking at the ritualistic dimension of orality and the ways in which folklore is constantly shaped by a multiplicity of voices over time, the artists recover Slavic and Baltic folk tales and traditions, but also eco-feminism and speculative fiction, to address their concern towards ecological crisis. Wandering through a weird narrative shaped by machine’s hallucinations resembling organic concretions and otherworldly voices of beyond human interpreters, in Mouthless Part I there’s a will to mine the synthetic concept of Nature and its opaque separation from humankind and technology. The stories of the unseen and unheard are evoked through sort of possessions, tracing back the cracks of history across multiple narratives inquiring the formation processes of phenomena such as witch-hunting, colonization, capitalistic exploitation of soil and creation of otherness.

Started in autumn 2019, Mouthless begins to live many lives and epilogues as a multimedia body of works: structured in chapters, it constantly redefine like a chimeric creature depending on exhibition space and contexts. Firstly exhibited at Fri Art Kunstalle in Friburg (CH), Mouthless was also hosted this year at Istituto Svizzero in Milan [together with live performance Mouthless II (Dziady)]. A further variation was presented the same year at Istituto Svizzero in Palermo with the solo exhibition Laments, while the last Chapter is on its way to be completed.

Until recent Mouthless (2020 - on going), your work was mainly based on Young Girl Reading Group, a collective project started in 2013 as a Facebook group and spread with nomadic IRL gatherings in which reading is conceived as a performative practice. Since YGRG, how did your work change over time?

From the beginning of our collaborative practice, we were interested in collective reading and exploring different narrative and material structures, moments when the shared text forms a sonic spatiality and becomes central in the creative process. In a way, the Mouthless series and all our new sculptural, painting and scent work parallels this performative engagement; our practice in general demonstrates an in-depth preoccupation with voice, embodiment of text, and a collective thought. The Mouthless video series specifically focuses on the emotions of fear and grief in relation to the ecological crisis through non-linear forms of narration and storytelling where fact and fiction interweave into one another. In its two existing iterations we formally explore different uses of language in the forming of collective creative spaces, including the reading group (in Mouthless Part I) and the polyphonic singing practice inspired by traditions hailing from Egl’ės native Lithuania (in Mouthless Part II).

While making Mouthless Part I, we were thinking of out loud reading as conjuring, of agency of finding voice and speaking out loud, as well as a potentiality of an artwork to call forth the unseen and unheard stories. At the centre of the film, the viewer finds a family that performs a number of arbitrary ritual gestures. Rather casual but yet slightly uncanny, the actions are modelled after the Eastern European tradition of cyclically calling forth the dead to reinhabit the spaces of the living. These rituals are there to conjure the voices of the unseen, whether the dead victims of the historical witch persecutions of Europe and the colonized lands or the depleted forests.

Scents, sculptures, chants and bodies interacting with both physical and digital space, make your practice collective and based on a mutual shared experience. What aspects do you focus on when imagining a performance or an exhibition?

Our work was always quite varied in its material and form. Developed within and outside the YGRG project, our research and works derived from it move between physical and digital spaces often turning to performativity as an operative aid acting as a bind for a practice in which somatic experience, be it material, molecular, individual or collective, forms the core. When thinking about new work, performance or exhibition, we aim to extend our language beyond that of the visual. Addressing the audience in unexpected ways, for instance, through smell and song, allows an openness for an emotional response that those media afford. In our work, we have been further aiming at looking beyond the limits of an inwardly contemplative art practice and introducing new techniques and conceptual frameworks. For instance, we are continuously interested in olfaction. In collaboration with International Flavors and Fragrances Inc., we recently created a new scent work titled A Large Piece of Turf 02:60 (2020). Referencing the title of Albrecht Dürer’s botanical watercolour from 1503, the work suggests the porous relationship between the self and the natural world and offers the olfactory as a form of representing this complexity. Here, an industrial diffuser emits an earthy and sweet yet synthetic fragrance of petrichor, a molecular moment of raindrops entering the dry soil. The smell of wet soil is known to stimulate a visceral response in people and to call forth distant memories. It is the molecular moment of the landscape entering the breathing body. We are particularly interested in smell as an engulfing spatial experience and attempt to consider the olfactory when thinking about our sculptural work as well. Another work of ours titled Hexanol (2019) also opens up to the viewer only when experienced in the exhibition space. In its form, the Hexanol sculpture is a pole carefully dressed in meadow hay, gathered together in a shape traditionally used by field workers in Eastern Europe. When experienced in the exhibition space, the sculpture often draws on the viewer’s idyllic memory of childhood. The title of our work Hexanol references the term used for a single isomeric molecule cis-3- Hexen-1-ol that is responsible for what we perceive as the smell of cut grass or old books. It is the smell of decomposing cellulose. The heap of hay is oddly similar in size to a human figure. The pile is held by an austere looking, polished stainless-steel or aluminium pole that eerily culminates in a sharp dagger form. The shape itself may suggest a pyre or a burning stake.

Recently some of your works became even more personal as they link to traditions and folktales of Poland and Lithuania, your native lands. Which stories have inspired your research, especially regarding the history of witch-hunting and esotericism?

Our practice is very much influenced by the readings of feminist and queer theory and (science) fiction; recently, we aim at applying our reading towards the stories from both where we are from and where we work. Mouthless Part I was created in the time we have been developing our solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Fribourg in Switzerland (2020). The video, thus, lifts the stories from the region’s history, specifically those of European witch persecution, quoting the historical records of the magistrate court in the city of Fribourg. One of the records directly quoted in the film as a voiceover, appearing over the ever transforming landscapes, is that of Barbli Bodmer of Wattenwyll accused of promiscuity and fornication with the devil in the forest. Under torture Bodmer confesses to the use of ointment, the making of a pact with the devil, the poisoning of water and apples, causing illness in humans and farm animals. Her trial and confession are rich in testimony of various people and graphic description of sexual acts with beasts and the devil. Bodmer was executed for witchcraft in what is now the area of Canton Fribourg, CH, in 1637.

Mouthless Part I weaves these and other historically specific stories into this weird narrative inspired by the framework of the Slavic and Baltic folk tales and traditions. The video aims to consider a number of urgencies we see as intertwined into the ecology of landscape including: primitive accumulation; histories of European deforestation; eco-feminist theory; folkloric undead beings originating in Slavic and Baltic cultures connected to the soil, swamp and terrestrial waters; and historic redefinition of the relation of the individual and the land. To approach this, weirdness appears to us as a particularly generative tool, since it provides us with an ecological worldview in which human and nature, human and non-human, are thoroughly imbricated, always on the verge of becoming other. With our body of work, we draw from the spirits of vernacular belief such as Topielec or Rusałka that serve to demonstrate that the past is not actually past at all and that the drowned, burned and buried—they have always lived—in the spill, in cyclical time, and in the landscape. In our new work, weirdness permeates both in content and form; a montage or conjoining of two or more references, aesthetics or concepts that seemingly do not go together is meant to destabilize the certainty of the sense of knowing. Wet like moss, it seeps into crevices of written texts, into the cracks of history and flourishes in the comforting darkness, intricately organic.

Hexanol I. LandLiebe group exhibition, Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur. (2021)

Reading as both an intimate and collective way to rediscover marginal stories can help us understand the cracks of our contemporary society. In your research you’re also interested in the mechanisms of knowledge production and circulation, from traditions of orality transmission, rituality and written sources, till nowadays informational systems. Do you think the artist as a storyteller and image-maker has the potential to suggest other ways of thinking and acting within a more normative context?

We have been looking into the history of the Western landscape painting tradition and through this research explored the formation of the concept of Nature as that, which has traditionally been defined as alien, outside to the subject in an effort to better understand the current ecological crisis. Amidst the ecological debates, we consider it necessary the artists choose to participate in the transdisciplinary conversations in order to better comprehend the complexities of the surrounding political, social and financial systems that shape the current landscape, and how the separation of the self from the environment developed historically. Our artistic practice has thus looked into the formation of hierarchies of knowledge turning to theory, fiction and fable in the process. Disinheriting the rigidity of knowledge and drawing from the mutability of folklore becomes a liberatory exercise which enables finding voice for those who have been denied it – today and through the centuries. We aim to parallel folklore and mimic its structure within the framework of art. Folklore is interesting to us because it provides itself to be shaped by communities through time and always remains fluid; it has the potentiality of providing us with counter-meanings and counter-stories. Landscape spirits function not only as metaphors but interfaces and processes that hold potentiality for a radical reimagining of our world — in which human and nature, human and nonhuman, are thoroughly imbricated. As a type of text, folklore is distinct in that it doesn’t “belong” to any individual or group; it is typically transmitted orally; it frequently undergoes modification. In our practice, we aim to use tools that speculate on possibilities for the different relationship to the environment. The established canon of white male sci-fi writing has offered a roadmap for the future in which we are now living. We believe that stories can also be told through a multiplicity of voices and deal with the fragile separation between the self and the environment as the primary site of speculation on identity, the body, and collectivity. For us it is eco-feminist and queer theory and science fiction interwoven with Slavic and Baltic mythology in order to create a narrative to act as a sort of hyperstition, a proposition for alternate ways of thinking about the surrounding world.

In Mouthless Part I, scenes of natural environments and breathing vegetation appears in weird convulsions as machine vision’s dream. What do you think are and will be the potential but also the problematic issues tied with machine vision and AI generated images? Can AI be a creative agent? And how could this artificial agent change our collective perception of the world and reality?

Much of our work is a study of the lack of comprehension, a meditation on free-flowing mutations that seek a radical shift of perspective on humankind and the natural world, defying the knowledge built on dichotomous principles. Several of our recent works include animated sequences performed by an open source Generative Adversarial Network. In Mouthless Part I (2020) and Part II (2021), the pledge offered by the voice of a disembodied conjurer suggests a lack of a vantage point between the summoner and summoned, synthetic and the natural, living and undead, the landscape and whoever perceives it. In the Gusła (2020) series of looped animations on LED holographic fans, chimeric creatures appear, contaminated by incessant splitting. These moving images present us with the ghostly quality of continuous mutation in between recognisable and fleeting, abstract and figurative. The story dissolves in its perpetual becoming, while the viewer looks for the natural in the synthetic in expectation of narrative cohesion. Produced algorithmically, they possess traits akin to folklore and explore the idea of AI involved in world-making and the circumstantial oddity that arises with the growing database of images of our culture. This parallels what we see traditionally in folklore- chimeric creatures, mutability of stories, entities and constant retalings of the tale which travels to reappear in different geographical locations. The Gusła works reference in their title Eastern European witching (in Polish: gusła) rites, where the ghostly conjuring is performed by algorithmic systems rather than magic practitioners. Still life of a thistle between carnations and cornflowers on a mossy forest floor (2020) is a short video which in its title directly recalls the baroque work by the celebrated commercial painter of still lifes, Rachel Ruysch (1683). The video is a fabulation on the idea of Nature. In the eyes of the protagonist arise reflections which escape classification and fixity and haunt the onlooker. Coming in and out of focus is also her face drawing the parallels between the instability of different representations. The reflections contest the art-historicised trope of still life as technologically framed image in equal measures pointing to the hegemonies of representation in art production as much as to the emerging algorithmic systems which increasingly build our understanding of the surrounding world.

With your recent solo exhibition Laments (2021) for Istituto Svizzero in Palermo, you brought this concept of poetic lament in reference to Timothy Morton’s definition of ecology theory as elegia (lamentations). How does your work reflect on the concept of Nature and Human?

Central to the exhibition Laments is the three-channel video installation Mouthless Part II. The piece is structured around a song, inspired by the Lithuanian sutartinė folk song tradition where three (or more) singers perform a looping text which becomes chant and texture, a sort of carrier of arcane information. Our song modelled after this tradition, quotes theory and poetry in equal measures. It is the basis for interpretation, embodiment and improvisation for the actors that lip-sync to the alien and otherworldly voices. The looped twenty four minute musical score weaves the staging of a peculiar ghostly dinner scene and artificial landscapes. With Mouthless Part II, we are thinking through queer ecology and recalling rituals connected to mourning, death and the threshold. A particularly important reference in this work is Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology (a fragment of which is also included in the publication Mouthless Laments which accompanied the exhibition). The script of the piece speaks both of the historical redefinition of the relation of the individual and the land and the contemporary complexity of the overhanging ecological drama. Mouthless Part II is a type of mourning - lament that is sung backwards over and over. This repetition not only points out the absurdities and weirdness of everyday life in the face of the global crisis but also represents a proposal to think about time, indeed existence itself, in loops and cycles. On the three screens, we see three figures performing the plaintive songs in front of sometimes surreal, computer-generated fog shrouded landscapes. The video imagines a situation in which demons fluid in their gender and speaking in tongues are called into a world without a separation of past, present and future, the human and non-human, the technological and natural forces, the living and the dead.

About future projects, what are you focused on right now? Are you working on something new?

When Luciana Parisi speaks of GAN imagery, she foregrounds the indeterminacy and randomness of these tools and their potentiality to defy the recursivity of algorithmic thought, which we would like to further explore next year in terms of conceptual research and material application. Taking from those ideas, last year we started developing the painting series, Seasons, which we will continue on working with this year. In 2021, we have also created a new performance piece -lalia, through a hybrid narrative that seamlessly blurs presumed polarities, such as Subject—Environment, Nature—Technology, Real—Virtual. The audience here is never able to observe the performance in its totality; the performance is split between two locations: a bar setting and a theatre space, mediated with a CCTV live stream connection. The scene unfolds as a mediated monologue performed by a demonic creature. Południca, the undead ‘noon girl’, is said to appear to the field workers at the hottest point of the day and ask them difficult questions to engage them in conversation. If anyone failed to answer a question or tried to change the subject, she would cut off their head or strike them with illness. The combination of text, costume, video and digital doubling creates a setting that is at once archaic and futuristic. Południca will act as a trigger for a speculative narrative to unfold, contemplating alternative connection points to the natural in the future. In 2022, we hope to expand this performance piece in new iterations. We also plan to complete the last in the series - Mouthless Part III. It will also take the Południca story as its core and will develop a narrative on weirdness that permeates and inhabits human, nonhuman bodies and the environment as imbricated in complex relations of desire and coconstitution. We would like to look more into a relatively new field of quantum biology and see the parallels in the discussion between science and humanities.