There's something in the cellar

On our visit in the summer we were lucky enough to go down into the bowels of the museum building, down in to the basement, where the taxidermy division is based. A little bit of back ground information here - the modern museum was built in the 1970's on the site of what had been the main jewish bank in Kaunas. This building sat oppostite the main synagagogue on one side and the main pedestrianised boulevard of the city, Laisves Aleja, on the other. Before the second world war, over a third of Kaunas's population was Jewish, and by the end of the conflict, they had all but been liquidated. Most of the survivors owe their lives to the work of two diplomats , Jan Zwartendijk who was the dutch consul (and Phillips Lighting rep in Lithuania) and Chiune Sugihahra who was the Japanese Consul. In the summer of 1940 they signed over 6,000 transit visas to get jews out of then soviet territory and out to safety through Japan. It was a remarkable act, especially for a japanese official of the time. When asked many years later why he had acted in defiance of his official orders and risked his career to save other people, he quoted an old samurai saying: "Even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge."

The old synagogue in Kaunas - the only synagogue still remaining in the town, I think.

Anyway, slightly digressing, but the musem sits on the site of the old bank which also housed a shopping arcade and from what I can understand was quite a focus of jewish life in the city. Here is a photo of the building as it used to look:

All that is left of this now are the old bank vaults which are the stores and taxidermy section for the museum. Lukas took us down to meet the staff down there and given the local history of the space it all felt very...atmospheric:

The taxidermists are an amazing powerhouse down underneath the museum proper. They are incredibly skilled at what they do; they can work for years on some of the bigger pieces, reconstructing the muscle and sinews on a skeleton in clay and then making a cast of this and re-stretching the skin over the top. These are skills passed down from master to apprentice - a macabre apostolic succession.

What struck me was the physical lack of 'animal' after the process was finished. You can just see one of the castings, the head of an antelope, to the left of the sprinbok on the wall (no corrections please). It really is just the skin, artfully pulled over the fibre glass. From this strange, translucent core, the ghost of the original animal, long since dead, you can create something that looks so lifelike in its glass cases. In most instances looking so real that you can feel a decided sadness to see them in the main halls of the museum, and yet the life is long gone from them.

The trophy room

Elsie is always having a go at me for taking panorama shots. Its just an asperger's man thing I assume. In this instance, quite useful (so there) to give you a sense of the space we are putting the piece together in. This is the trophy room at the Museum. The walls all around are hung with the antlers from medal winning beasts. Our piece is going to suspend from the lattice ceiling above and hang down into the middle of the room.

The brains behind the operation

Some of the tricks we are going to be playing with the lighting comes down to the clever programming and control of the LED lights being built in to the sculpture. LED technology is advancing in huge leaps and bounds with and we are using some of the most advanced and most powerful white light sources from Tridonic. I was over in Dublin yesterday to meet with Peter Barry from Emcon who knows it all when it comes to electronics. This is Pete outside the company, beaming for the camera!




Emcon are joint sponsors of the lighting equipment for the piece, along with Tridonic; without their help and encouragement we would be tying bicycle lights onto coat hangers. Thanks a mill, guys.


They were burning in thousands of LEDs to ensure there were no faulty units for a project to light up the exterior of a new airport terminal and all the test boxes were full of saturated blue light.

Other things which caught my eye

We had a great trip out to Kaunas at the beginning of the month, to meet the museum director and technical engineer, and also our fantastic biennale producer Kotryna. It was good to get some of the logistics for the project firmed up, and also to have a more focused look at the Ivanauskas collection - more of our thoughts on this to follow.

I am so glad that we also had a chance to visit out to Rumsiskes - it’s a wonderful museum of vernacular buildings from all the different regions of Lithuania a few miles out of Kaunas. Such beautiful use of materials and amazing instinctive pattern making. Couldn’t help thinking though, what a hard life it must have been.

Amazing jazzy painted wooden barn doors

This wooden shingle roof was weathered to a lovely pewter. It really had the feel of a beautiful herringbone.

I was really excited too, to find some Karpiniai. These are traditional Lithuanian papercuts, which were used to decorate windows when lace was too expensive. This idea of papercuts and shadows feels very resonant for our project.

A bit of background:

The project has come about as a result of an artists exchange programme which I took part in at the last Textile biennale - 2007. The programme was a joint initiative between the Kaunas Textile Biennale and the London Printworks Trust. I was invited to Kaunas for a week in December 2007 to visit the biennale, and explore the city. It was a wonderful trip, full of extraordinary discoveries. You can read a brief summary of the trip here:

http://www.londonprintworks.com/downloads/london_to_lithuania.PDF

One of the most unexpected and strangest experiences was a visit to the Tado Ivanauskas zoological museum. There was something so incongruous about all the beautiful specimens - collected from the farthest ends of the world and brought to this dark wintery corner of the Baltic. So when Peter and I were putting our thoughts together about the project, it seemed a perfect starting place.

The collection is pretty extensive, starting from the thousands of beautiful moths and butterflies on the top floor, and descending down through the insects and reptiles to the birds on the first floor gallery, and then the larger mammals on the ground floor.

Here are some of the creatures we spotted in the city

The Museum

The museum itself is on Laisves Avenue, the great 1.5km long pedestrianised route that runs straight through the middle of town. Set up by its namesake in the 1920's and re-built in the 1970's it houses a collection of stuffed zoological specimens from around the world.