The good news is, all our Lithuanian artist friends are great. And Miga has organised for us to present our work to each other at the Contemporary Art Centre, the CAC, tomorrow afternoon.
The bad news is, we’re very worried, now, about what we’ve let ourselves in for.
For a start, we had bought flowers, vodka and pickles to welcome our eight fellow artists. Ten turned up – which didn’t seem to make any sense.
It got more bewildering when the director put us all into the studio with the sofas and started calling out names. This was in Lithuanian, but Renate, our facilitator, whispered a translation for us. He called out two men, then a woman.
Then he announced that the remaining seven people had to find bananas – if they found one, they’d be in – otherwise they were out. It became apparent that the crude foil packages that looked like giant Hershey kisses on the floor were key to this.
Some had bananas, some had sweetcorn cobs.
Devela, who the lads had met in the bar the night before, was not in.
Aukse, who had a banana, decided she didn’t think she wanted to be in this show any more, and gave her banana to Romeo, who’d found only sweetcorns.
Each of them then had to say something about themselves, on camera.
It was excruciating – we squirmed, and so did they. Whoever updated our facebook page got it right – it was totally disrespectful to the artists.
Turns out that these guys had only recieved an email the day before, telling them to be at the studio at the alotted time. They had no idea what was going to happen after that.
There’s more. The director spoke to the remaining Lithuanian artists while we looked on and they told us, later, that he said they all should stay in the dorm – because they want to film us there.
As far as we’re concerned, that’s just NOT going to happen. It’s not what we signed up for. What’s more, most of them don’t want to, and why would they? As it happens, our communal area can barely accomodate us as it is.
They were also told that the project goes on till the 7 September. Er, no it doesn’t. We’ve all made arrangements to be back home at the beginning of September.
Strangely, only me and Tom were miked up, but the filming only stopped half way through our barbeque.
Right now, none of us are kicking our heels with joy – and neither are our new Lithuanian friends, who, it appears, are even more guinea pigs than we are.
It all reinforces our concern that the new producers aren’t concerned with making a show about art, which is what we came here for, but intend to go for sensationalism – of the most crummy kind.
Let’s just say, we’re considering our options.
