Let’s Play Fluxus! with Dainava community
Artists: Felicia Hansen and Ugnė Makselytė
The friendship between the Kaunas Biennial and Dainava community started recently, in 2024, after the NGO Family Center “Let’s be together” kindly agreed to collaborate. It is a great and active, socially responsible organization which offers social services for the people living in Dainava, the largest microdistrict of Kaunas. The organization is visited by socially sensitive groups of people, such as seniors, single mothers, persons on probation, and the unemployed, who come here to spend leisure time, ask for advice and support or simply to hang out. The aim of the Magic Carpets project was to bring the Dainava community closer to art, inviting them to co-create and, in this way, unite socially excluded groups of people with the ones that have no issues of being heard in society.
In 2024, as part of the Magic Carpets project, Kaunas Biennial was happy to collaborate with Kaunas Artists House for the Fluxus Festival. Held annually in Kaunas since 2017, the festival attracts thousands of people for a communal experience in the city center. Dressed in creative DIY costumes, they come together at night to climb a hill in celebration of the Fluxus art movement and its founder, George Mačiūnas, who was born in Kaunas. The festival also includes a wide cultural program of exhibitions, movie screenings and discussions. The collaboration started after recognizing the strong compatibility between Fluxus-inspired ideas and the values of the Magic Carpets project. According to the festival’s organisers, Fluxus is described as a desire for constant movement, elevation and change: from center to non-center, from the everyday to unexpectedness. DIY, stepping out of one’s comfort zone and playing games in everyday life are just a few of many Fluxus values that are also relevant to the Magic Carpets platform, which aims to strengthen the community involvement in arts.
Two artists were invited to collaborate with Dainava community and present their co-creative results as part of the Fluxus Festival program.
Felicia Hansen is a Danish-born textile artist currently based in Sweden. Felicia deconstructs discarded teddy bears into new objects to create sustainable art and atypical interior designs. Do you know where your old teddy is? “Most people don’t”, answers the artist and invites everyone to reflect on the increase in post-consumer waste from the toy industry and to critique contemporary consumer culture. Referring to herself humorously as a Professional Teddy Bear Killer, Felicia invites others to join her in re-creation of toys as new objects. Her playful and soft approach to art fosters engagement and encourages co-creation.
While attending the Magic Carpets residency in Kaunas, Felicia had a few meetings with the community. First, she invited the Dainava community to her original “Teddy Bear Killer” workshop. Both regular visitors of the center as well as newcomers living in Dainava attended, resulting in an intriguing mix of participants. Individuals of varying ages (2 to 80 years old) and social backgrounds made for a new and inspiring group for Felicia to work with, as her usual experience was focused only on children. Together, they dismantled and re-constructed second-hand toys, crafting playful new characters. It was beautiful to see how an unusual activity created opportunities for people to meet and share positive emotions together. For the next time, Felicia suggested that the group should prepare for the culmination of Fluxus festival together, as it is a great opportunity for communities to creatively represent themselves. Envisioning a large textile banner, Felicia went for a walk in Dainava and asked people on the streets about what this microdistrict means to them and what keywords come to mind when thinking about their surroundings. Various words were collected, such as green, parks, concrete, meeting or apartment buildings. Thanks to this, visual representations of Dainava were created using the technique of a collage with discarded textiles. Felicia stitched up all the little squares into a large banner which the community members of Dainava later proudly carried at the carnival of the Fluxus Festival.
In addition to the co-creative processes with the community, the artist has also developed her personal exploration of Dainava through her own artistic language titled “Teddy Bears of Dainava“. It was inspired by Dainava surroundings, people and experiences. The piece was installed at the “Let’s Play Fluxus” exhibition, which presented the results of the Magic Carpets residency and opened the Fluxus Festival Intro program at the Kaunas Artists House. The installation also showcased pictures documenting the process of the residency, and the toy characters created by community members.
For the exhibition, Felicia also co-created a video piece together with the sound artist Ugnė Makselytė, who participated in the Magic Carpets residency and collaborated with Dainava community as well. The different mediums inspired the two artists to create a collaborative piece. They decided to explore the behind-the-scenes aesthetics of the teddy bear’s dismantling and complement it with Ugnė’s sonic interpretation, experimenting with the ways in which sound can enhance the tactile and visual qualities of textiles. The experimental video “Sacrifice of a Teddy Bear“ was presented at the exhibition together with the leftovers of the actual toy.
Ugnė Makselytė is a sound artist and composer of experimental music based in Kaunas, Lithuania. She is interested in areas of acoustic ecology, field recordings, and collective improvisation. For the residency of the Magic Carpets, Ugnė wished to implement the practices of deep listening and soundscape explorations together with the community members based on a collective exploration of the self and the environment. Deep listening is a certain state of consciousness achieved by active listening to the soundscape around and within oneself. Soundscape in this case can be defined as the totality of the sounds that surround the listener. The artist was confident that practices focused on acoustic ecology and active listening would perfectly satisfy the need to include socially sensitive groups in the creative process and could become an excellent tool for strengthening the relationship with the surrounding everyday environment and other participants.
How many different sounds do you hear at the moment? Which sound reminds you of home? What is the difference between listening and hearing? These were some of the questions that Ugnė asked the members of the Dainava community during the first workshop. Ugnė also introduced the group to the basic theory of deep listening and afterwards invited them to collectively participate in easy first-step meditation exercises, which helped them to understand how deep listening works in practice. With the help of professional sound recorders, Dainava residents themselves collected sounds in the park of Dainava, walking and counting the different sounds that they hear, closing their eyes while walking and trusting the partner. The recorders made it possible to hear the sounds that are usually conceived without even noticing them. The final meeting with the community of Dainava had a special format – soundscape picnic. During the picnic, which was held at the “Let’s Be Together” center due to bad weather, people tasted foods and drinks that were specially selected by Ugnė as a way to ensure that interesting sounds would be made while eating. People were chewing, crackling, laughing, and chatting, and while doing this everything was captured by using professional recorders. Ugnė wove all the recorded sounds together into a single piece, “Part of the Family”. The title was suggested by a 10-year-old boy from Dainava when all community members participated in the choice of the title. The piece invites people to slow down, travel through memories, smile and dream. At the “Let‘s Play Fluxus!’ exhibition, which showcased the final results of the residencies, the sound piece was presented in the experimental sensory installation, inviting visitors to experience the artwork inspired by the soundscapes of Dainava collectively, with their eyes covered. It was inspiring to see how curious and proud the community members were while listening to the piece that resulted from their experimentations during the Magic Carpets workshops with the artist.
Final event and residency results
The final results of the residencies were celebrated in two different Fluxus events. The “Let’s Play Fluxus!” exhibition, which started the aforementioned Intro program of the Fluxus festival, was opened by the Kaunas Biennial at the Kaunas Artists House. The exhibition showcased all the artworks developed during the Magic Carpets residencies of 2024, including installations by Felicia Hansen and Ugnė Makselytė.
After the exhibition was opened, the Fluxus festival culminated on a warm Saturday night in September, in the form of a carnival, when people climbed up the hill of Parodos street in Kaunas. The city’s dwellers and guests were preparing for the event all evening, as more than 10 open workshops were organized by various community members of Kaunas, who initiated the joint making of DIY costumes as a way to creatively express individual as well as communal identity. Felicia participated in the preparational process too, suggesting that the idea of discarded textile collage banners should be continued. It started as a representation of the Dainava surroundings, but eventually expanded into a wide concept which represents various special places of Kaunas. Hundreds of people joined the Dainava community in the open workshop. The symbolic act of the communal climbing up the hill together with other kind people while carrying the representational DYI objects and dressed in impressive costumes summarized the whole process of the residencies and time spent together while seeking for positive impact on individuals and communities.
Curator of the project: Brigita Bareikytė
Community facilitator: Austėja Bliumkytė – Padgurskienė
Partners: FLUXUS festival, Kaunas Artist House, NGO Family Center “Let’s be together” (VšĮ “Būkime kartu“), Non-governmental charity and support foundation “Frida”, Openart, Wrocławski Instytut Kultury, Kauno Kolegija Higher Education Institution.
Big thank you to all who contributed to the realization of this project: bakery “Bundu”, “Pranciškaus malūnas“, Kaunas yoga studio, Vytautas Magnus University, restaurant “Skliautas“, UPS, “Tiesiog” studio, Deimantas Mackevičius, Jomantas Padgurskas, Arūnas Periokas, Gintarė Žaltauskaitė, Vaida Barzdaitė, Marius Paplauskas, Nataliia Tataurova, Martynas Gedvila, Paulina Brelinska-Garzska, Sofia Gustafsson, Diana Povilaitus, Kateryna Polupanova, Birutė Zeigienė and all the wonderful community members!
The project is partly funded by European Union and Lithuanian Culture Institute.
Curatorial text by Brigita Bareikytė