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Lina Lapelytė, Pirouette, Opening Roots to routes, Photo by Aurélien Meimaris, courtesy of Routes to roots, Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020
Lina Lapelytė, Pirouette, Opening Roots to routes, Photo by Aurélien Meimaris, courtesy of Routes to roots, Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020

September 27, 2021, 6:00 pm

MIT Building E15-001
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA, USA

This event is free and open to MIT Affiliated individuals. Registration is required and seating is limited.

**PLEASE NOTE** In accordance with COVID-19 contact tracing guidelines, contact information for all event attendees, including name and cell phone number or email address will be collected via the RSVP form. All attendees are required to wear a face covering indoors. 

During this talk Lina Lapelytė will attempt to reiterate some of her performances and will discuss her most recent works:

What happens with a dead fish?
A musical performance work with a local choir of amateur singers from Brussels, commissioned by Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

Currents
Made together with architect Mantas Petraitis (Implant Architecture) and commissioned by RIBOCA2  –  a site-specific installation on water constructed out of 2000 pine logs.

Sun & Sea (Marina)
An opera performance made in collaboration with Rugil
ė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, which won the Golden Lion for the best national representation at the Biennale di Venezia in 2019.

Pirouette
Conceived for a retired ballerina and a saxophonist using the circular-breathing technique.

Study of Slope
Lina’s current investigation based on the tone-deaf singing, currently on view at the Trust and Confusion show at the Tai Kwun contemporary, Honk Kong.

Following Lina’s presentation, she will be joined by:
Sara L. Brown, set designer and Assistant Professor in Music and Theater Arts
Nicole L’Huillier, transdisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate at MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future group
Gediminas Urbonas, ACT Associate Professor
Nomeda Urbonas, ACT Affiliate

About the artist:
Lina Lapelytė
(b.1984 Kaunas, Lithuania) lives and works in Vilnius and London. Her performance-based practice flirts with pop culture, explores gender stereotypes, aging and nostalgia.

Her works engage trained and untrained performers often in an act of singingthrough a wide range of genres such as mainstream music and opera. The singing takes the form of a collective and affective event that questions vulnerability and silencing. 

Her collaborative work with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, opera Have a Good Day!holds several awards and its been touring extensively. Their durational performance work​ ​Sun and Sea (Marina)​ ​represented Lithuania at the Venice Art Biennale (2019) and received the Golden Lion award for the best national participation.

About the respondents:

Sara Brown is a set designer and Assistant Professor in Music and Theater Arts. Recent projects include The Mother of Us All at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fat Ham with the Wilma Theater, and The Other Shore with Jacob’s Pillow which will debut as a VR performance in August of 2021 and as a live installation in the summer of 2022.Her designs have been seen at the BAM Next Wave Festival, the Festival d’automn in Paris and The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.

Nicole L’Huillier (b. 1985, Santiago, Chile) is a transdisciplinary artist. She works with sounds, vibrations, resonances, and multiple transductions. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future group, Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences.

Gediminas Urbonas is an artist, educator, researcher and co-founder of US: Urbonas Studio (together with Nomeda Urbonas), 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.

Nomeda Urbonas is a Lithuanian artist and educator who has a joint artistic practice, Urbonas Studio, with Gediminas Urbonas. Urbonas Studio is the interdisciplinary research program that advocates for the reclamation of public culture in the face of overwhelming privatization, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Often beginning with archival research, Urbonas Studio methodology unfolds complex participatory works investigating the urban environment, architectural developments, and cultural and technological heritage.