Allard van Hoorn

054 Urban Songline (26 Paving Tiles) | Latitude: 54.899107° N – 54.899867° N / Longitude: 23.911322° E – 23.914066° E. 2017

Performance and sound file; recording equipment, paving blocks, screw

Vienybės a. (Unity Square), Kaunas
15.09.2017, 18.00

www.bienale.lt/2017/unitysquare

Kaunas’ open-air pantheon of Lithuanian National heroes – in which most of the monuments were erected in the 1920s and 1930s to celebrate Lithuania as an independent nation state, then demolished during the Soviet occupation, and subsequently reconstructed during the Independence movement in the late 1980s – is situated right next to a vast empty square in which, during Soviet years, a huge statue of Lenin stood, until it was removed with the fall of Communism. Since then the “national” part of the Unity Square has acquired new paving of expensive granite slabs, while the “Soviet” part retained the old paving of hopelessly cracked cement tiles. There is a clear divide in the Unity Square between these two worlds, two ideologies, between the new and the old, the West and the East, the future and the past. This divide is made up of 26 paving tiles that do not belong to either side. They are neither of new granite, nor of old cracked cement. They are just paving tiles. They are like a liminal space – neutral and independent. But they are about to disappear under the unity of renovation.

Allard van Hoorn has extracted sound from the 26 paving tiles and created a sound file as a souvenir – to be taken away, either as a piece of this ‘in-between’ space, or as a memory of it. File link: Allard van Hoorn, Urban Songline.