Video commissioned for “Roots to Routes,” curated by Juste Kostikovaite, Maija Rudovska and Merilin Talumaa, with the support of the Baltic Culture Fund. Part of the installation was made in collaboration with Gintaras Černius.

Agents is a moving image work which was created during the spring of 2020, contemplating on folk art history and observing the effect of strict quarantine measures on people and their creativity. Revisiting and filming the sites with public sculpture made in traditional wood crafting motifs of her region, Sosunova notices how forests and parks are gradually filled with spontaneous vernacular art and temporary structures by its visitors. Investigating the agency behind the folk art revival and the vernacular creativity, the protagonist of the video initiates a dialogue with a wood artisan to express suspicions and learn what lies behind their intentions to reproduce ethnic art imagery and myths. As the conversation unfolds, it destabilizes the discourse around cultural practices and codes of folkloric symbolism – successfully co-opted into nationalist self-mythologies – to open up the possibility of forms of co-existing and making, unbridled by the exclusions determined by some imagined past. And while we question whether agency can be distributed around a host of artefacts, the two in the car wait for an ‘agent’ to be sighted in the flesh and action. 

(The dialogue with wood artisan Gintaras Černius was scripted and edited for artistic purposes)

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: The thing is