Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas, n.d.. Photo: Berta Tilmantaite. Image courtesy of the artists.

Gediminas Urbonas – Associate Professor, 2009 – Present
Nomeda Urbonas – ACT Affiliate, 2011 – Present

Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas are artists, educators, researchers, and co-founders of US: Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Since 1997, the artists have practiced in entangled terrains across architecture and the urban environment, media, and politics, devising participatory works that limn possible alternative forms of self-organization.

Pro-test Lab Archive

Urbonas’s Pro-test Lab Archive is an installation bringing together images and props related to a series of events reclaiming public space in the city of Vilnius, Lithuania (2005-2012).

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Pro-test Lab Archive. Image courtesy of the artists.

Designed to address the memory, trauma, and emotions attached to the destruction of public space. The archive maps attempts to stage an autonomous platform for action through art. Documenting the “possibilities of impossible protest” against the specific situation of the privatization of public space, with a focus on Lietuva Cinema.

The Lietuva was built in 1965 as a piece of Soviet modernist architecture, becoming the biggest cinema in Lithuania and played an important role in the imaginative life of a whole generation of local people.

In 2005 Lietuva was squatted and converted into a ‘pro-test’ lab where people could propose different protest scenarios; to both inspire action and make it happen. Beginning as a case study of the destruction of the Lietuva – the largest Soviet modernist movie theatre in Lithuania – it has developed into an action space and an archive of various forms of protest (and legal proceedings) against the corporate privatization of public space.

Urbonas Studio, Collection for Work and Rebellion, 2006. Image courtesy of the artists.

Dogs Barking Will Not Disturb the Clouds, organized by the Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Arts, 2005. Image courtesy of the artists.

America Will Help Us, action organized by the VILMA - Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Arts, 2005. Image courtesy of the artists.

VIPmarket (city specific street Monoply), organized by the architecture student club ASK, 2005. Image courtesy of the artists.

Karaoke

On the final workday before the Lithuanian Savings Bank—the country’s last state-owned bank—was privatized in 2001, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas staged a series of actions that rubbed up against the happy-go-lucky narrative of a post-communist Lithuania. Bank employees, alongside actors, performed ABBA’s “Money Money Money” inside the bank’s lobby: the camera pans across a chorus of women in demure skirts and pantyhose while they gave alternately dispassionate and spirited deliveries of the song—“I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay / Ain’t it sad / And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me / That’s too bad”—edited together into five seemingly continuous takes.

The ease with which Lithuania embraced both the allure and mundanity of the private market is repeated here ad nauseum, and a building embodying the ideals of Marxist economics becomes a soundstage for the cheesiest subordination to the free market.