The former prison, which is opening its doors again after a couple of years, invites you to its second exhibition "Traps with central heating". In it, the team of curators assembled by the Lithuanian National Museum and the Institute of Lithuanian History will talk about life in Lithuania in 1965-1993. Visitors will be confronted with Soviet reality, which will hopefully encourage them to find a relationship with the issues of the controversial past, and at the same time, to become more resistant to the attempts of entrapment that continue today.
"It is necessary to talk about the trap in which we lived for almost half a century, to try to deconstruct it, because the events of recent years show that not all people who lived in that system were able to escape from it. The Soviet Union collapsed, but the same processes did not stop in Russian society. The disastrous results of this are obvious, as is the attempt to re-export this trap to other countries. Thus, the exhibition will help us to understand what we transfer from this era to our lifestyle today and what we should get rid of, and at the same time - to become more resilient as a society, to develop critical thinking", highlights the relevance of the exhibition, Dr. Rūta Kačkutė.
The curators of the exhibition are art critic Ernestas Parulskis, historians Assoc. Dr. Aurimas Švedas and dr. Valdemaras Klumbys, literary scholar prof. Dr. Dalia Satkauskytė - chose to reveal the history of the Soviet era of Lithuania in the exhibition through the prism of everyday life. It will provide an opportunity to experience and reflect on history in a new way, focusing on the level of Soviet reality that most directly affected people. In this experiential journey through the Soviet era, visitors who lived through it will be encouraged to get to know themselves better, to analyze their feelings and experiences, while the younger ones, who have not seen this period, will have the opportunity to understand the conditions in which their parents and grandparents lived.
"For a large part of Lithuanian society, the Soviet era is a space-time in which existentially important things took place: people chose professions, studied at universities, created families and raised children, and were engaged in creativity. However, the era of the Soviet era is moving away from us not only chronologically, but also emotionally. The era of the 90s became the threshold between the present and the Soviet era, which is turning into the past. Therefore, the Soviet era in the era of Independence turns into a "foreign country", which for many of its researchers and people born at the turn of the eras already opens up not as a lived through, therefore understandable, but as a fundamentally different, therefore surprising, confusing, shocking, and sometimes laughable reality", - states historian Assoc. Dr. Aurim Švedas.
Traps: intellectual, scientific, memory, emotional
The curators did not choose the name of the exhibition by chance: the people who lived in this period had to learn various survival strategies and tactics while carefully moving around the territory of existential traps and their perimeter. It is a story about the "little man's" daily attempts to survive, think, communicate, and engage in various forms of life creation, despite the ubiquitous molds of being and household.
According to the historian dr. Valdemar Klumbi, there are more possibilities for interpreting the title of the exhibition, which allow us to talk about the multi-meaning of the word "trap": "The Soviet era, which has become an object of historical science, acts as an intellectual trap: there are so many unclear, ambiguous, controversial topics that the researcher often feels powerless , when he needs to tell what he sees: white or black, so very often he has to choose a different color, and not necessarily gray. Meanwhile, public opinion usually demands answers that are limited to the black and white palette."
Soviet era de jure ended on March 1990, 11, but the occupation de facto the result of the final stage can be recorded on August 1993, 31 at 23 p.m. 45 minutes, when the last units of the Russian army stationed here left Lithuania. However, the creators of the exhibition raise the question, when did the experiment carried out in the Soviet trap end in politics, economy, culture, everyday life, mentality and other areas? Are homo sovieticus really become a thing of the past?
The answers to this and many other questions can be found while walking through the cells of the Former Detention Center, each of which tells about the mechanisms, ideology and rituals that created the Soviet reality, economy and work, earnings and deprivation, scarcity and fashion, the transformation of history into propaganda, lies and willful oblivion.
The exhibition "Trap with central heating" opens on June 28 at 18 p.m. In the former detention center, T. Kosciuškos st. 1, Vilnius, and will be open until the end of October.
