Guest Editor Vaiva Grainytė
As a member of the editorial board since the very first issue of Forest as a Journal in 2021, I have had the privilege of witnessing the magazine’s shapeshifting existence – like nine pieces of a conceptual mosaic, with this volume forming the tenth.
Why ‘spirit’? For some time, I have wanted to bring forward topics and personalities that tend to fall under the radar in contemporary art and culture. I use ‘spirit’ as an umbrella term encompassing my vision, beyond beliefs and devotional practices. My curatorial method was simple: some themes led me to approach authors versed in them, while other authors I admired helped foster additional topics. The texts follow a precise inner logic of correspondence, echoing one another in a lush constellation.
Guest Editor Vaiva Grainytė
As a member of the editorial board since the very first issue of Forest as a Journal in 2021, I have had the privilege of witnessing the magazine’s shapeshifting existence – like nine pieces of a conceptual mosaic, with this volume forming the tenth.
Why ‘spirit’? For some time, I have wanted to bring forward topics and personalities that tend to fall under the radar in contemporary art and culture. I use ‘spirit’ as an umbrella term encompassing my vision, beyond beliefs and devotional practices. My curatorial method was simple: some themes led me to approach authors versed in them, while other authors I admired helped foster additional topics. The texts follow a precise inner logic of correspondence, echoing one another in a lush constellation.
Visually, the journal begins with a well – a portal for the journey. The imagery comes from Kamilė Krasauskaitė’s installation holy wells & trees and other faith healing sites, acting as both the entrance and exit points. The sequence of visuals that follows is intended as a trailer for the volume’s contributions. The veiled little chapels of poetry by Evie Shockley, Ariana Reines, and Giedrė Kazlauskaitė further subdivide the body of this issue.
The first part of the magazine treats spirit as charisma, inspiration, and legacy. Temples of Influence opens with Evie Shockley’s ‘in) spirit/s (ion’: here, the body is a toy ruled by lungs – the puppeteers – and even after the last exhale, the spirit lives on.
In her essay ‘Vilius Orvidas: The Stone Altars’, Oksana Judakova blends academic interest in outsider art with fragments of memory and impression: Orvidas, a stone carver, who cut an unorthodox spiritual figure (a genuine pantheist-Buddhist- Daoist-Christian, and an intuitive ecologist). I was also struck by the sanctuary he built; each visit is etched deeply in the record of my personal growth journey: first in my early twenties, a few times thereafter, and most recently as an inspirational starting point for this edition.
Sandro Bozzolo’s essay ‘The Legacy of Antanas Mockus’s Charisma’ is a diaristic memoir of the legendary Lithuanian politician and activist – the former Mayor of Bogotá – whose eccentric acts made the impossible possible, and helped make the world a better place. I’ve been mesmerised by Sandro’s stories of his close relationship with Mockus, his family, and his captivating mother, the artist Nijolė Šivickas. My brief encounters with Colombian people of different generations during the Sun and Sea opera-performance tour in Bogotá in 2024 attested to Mockus’s image as a living temple.
‘Relevance is the idea of bringing something into visibility, something that hadn’t been active in consciousness before – not that it wasn’t there, but simply that it wasn’t regarded’, says the scholar Elisa Tamarkin in her conversation ‘Relevance is God’ with Mike Sperlinger. Tamarkin suggests an exciting interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ as an accident – a life-changing disturbance. This notion rhymes with Bozzolo’s Erasmus semester in Lithuania as a young sociologist, when a random Colombian girl – the equivalent of Poe’s raven – brought Mockus into his field of attention.
The second part – Archaeologies of Queer Divine – reflects on and challenges cultural concepts of divinity. Eglė Elena Murauskaitė’s piece ‘Mommy and Me, and My Lovers’ hacks the code of dominant Christian iconography by opening the dancefloor for the true and liberated ‘Me-divine’: St. Sebastian dances the pole, Bernard of Clairvaux is immersed in a kiss, Mother Mary becomes merry, and, finally, the negative mother complex dies down.
This cheeky peeling away of normative layers opens up the legacy of Marija Gimbutas, the legendary archaeologist, with renewed depth. Her theories of ‘Old Europe’ and the Great Goddess contested previously dominant narratives of how human civilisation developed. Kotryna Lingienė’s conversation with the scholar Rasa Navickaitė, ‘Excavating the Feminine Spirit’, discusses ‘a powerful, mind-shifting perspective’ that expands stereotypical notions of God, stemming from binary conceptions of gender. Their dialogue draws a timeline from Gimbutas’s proto-feminist ideas to contemporary art and politics, exploring the ‘triple outsider’s’ synchronicity with the ‘spirit of the time’.
In her sensually pulsating essay ‘Wounds, Mouths, Moons, Holes, Souls’, Lucia Pietroiusti continues the theological excavation: she incorporates the words of Medieval female mystics alongside her own carnally ecological revelations, and input from other contemporary thinkers. God ejaculates, God gives birth, God is food, God is devoured in a cosmic metabolic cycle of birth and death, together with nonhuman organisms –‘being consumed is like going home’.
An electric poem by Ariana Reines bridges the second and third parts of the journal. ‘Arena’ begins as a private litany of ‘& because’, growing into a list of unorthodox religious and occult practices. Yet, this insatiable uroborus spins on in the messy world, infused with violence and politics, which interfere with its ecstatic quest to know itself.
Part three, Selfdome, pays tribute to the spirit of authenticity. One’s ‘true self ’ is also pierced by external reality – forced to contend with an established image, and to integrate within a body and a home(land). This section begins with the mockumentary ‘Their Smooth Flaky Whiteness – White Magic in Greenland’ by the artist duo benandsebastian: a satire on aggression and dominance. The authors propose an amusing concept of ‘white magic’, overlapping timelines and pulling us into the epicentre of global politics. The fictionalised blend of expedition diaries with those penned by eighteenth-century male characters effectively unfolds against the ruins of a peaceful matristic civilisation, which – according to Gimbutas’s theory – was exterminated by a primitive, aggressive race. In the texts that follow, Greenland – an arena of constant imperial ‘abracadabras’ – morphs into an approximation of a ‘self ’, fending off external invasions.
The artist Anastasia Sosunova explores a historical junction with the printing plate at its centre – as a matrix and a womb – in ‘Fanwork: On the Cross-Contamination of Fictions, Censorship, and the History of Publishing’. The storyline intertwines her artistic practice with questions about the lifespan and impact of reproduced images governed by passion and obsession as a way to undo justice. The DIY retailer Senukai, which originally sparked Sosunova’s ‘fandom as praxis’ reappears in Giedrė Kazlauskaitė’s poem ‘February’: ‘I am one of a million screws in this store’s storeroom. / God, help me better understand that I am nothing, and not the ruler of the world.’ In ‘June’, Kazlauskaitė narrates driving lessons as a threshold of becoming, and as a means of integrating a complex queer individuality: both a loving mother and a rejected daughter. In my mind’s eye, this summons a quip by Jonas Mekas, who saw Vilius Orvidas’s mother mocking her child as an approximation of Lithuania – rejecting its queer, and underappreciating the different.
In ‘Counting Souls’, the philosopher Vilius Dranseika explores the notion of identity as a multi-headed monster, consisting of new and old selves. He builds on an age-old dispute concerning the number of souls living in the bodies of conjoined twins. ‘The soul <…> shows itself in the living pattern of expression: gesture, posture, voice, words <…> to understand someone, is not to look past the body but to learn to read it’, says Dranseika.
Borrowing these lines from the final contribution, I want to share my thanks: to all the brilliant authors for bringing forth the soul of this journal; to the editorial team behind the scenes, for assisting in the formation of its posture; and to the Lithuanian Culture Institute, for entrusting me with the stewardship of this volume. I am also grateful to Vytautas Česnys, Modestas Ežerskis, Sigitas Baltramaitis, Staselė Naujokaitienė, Audrius Naujokaitis, and Leonardas Surgaila, who shared their photographic archives or made them available posthumously. Finally, I wish to thank the journal’s designer, Laura Varžgalytė, for her patience and for the gift of carefully shaping and visualising my intuitive vision. The body of the journal mirrors an open-ended, fluid concept of the main theme. Its white colour carries connotations of purity, holiness, light, newness, death, wisdom, healing, and eternity. Significantly, in physics, white light represents the sum of visible colours – essentially containing a rainbow – akin to the spectrum of spirit contained in this issue.
My radio play Twenty Four is appended to this volume, in the tradition of introducing the guest-editor’s practice within the conceptual framework of the issue. The script can be followed in the English print, and the QR code offers an invitation to a sonic Jungian dream-like experience: a liturgy of individuation, expressed in an unknown language by over 60 voices. The journey of Spirit as a Journal ends here with the final Tarot card of the Major Arcana, The World, one of whose aspects points to integration: completion as wholeness.
From This Issue
Oksana Judakova
Translated by Eglė Elena Murauskaitė
Vilius Orvidas (1952–1992) was a third-generation stone-carver. Upon completing his military service in the soviet1 army in 1973, he returned to his parents’ homestead near Salantai and started shaping it into a sculpture garden – a project he continued until his passing in August 1992. It all started with attempts to rescue massive boulders from soviet land reclamation projects.
At the time, boulders would typically be brought from fields to the quarry and broken apart, and lone homesteads would be demolished, with the old trees around them chopped down. Vilius would bring these field boulders and ancient oak trunks back home, piling them up, as he tried to preserve some of the antiques, all the while digging ponds and planting trees on his land.
Sandro Bozzolo
Translated by Bruce Tris
It was two in the morning on a night in late May, or maybe June, and I was on a balcony overlooking the main pedestrian street, Laisvės Alėja, in the city of Kaunas. I was an Erasmus student, and a party at my house was in full swing. I remember the door opening and a stranger stepping out onto the balcony. It was a Colombian girl who had come to Lithuania from South America because she wanted to find out about the origins of a man who had changed her life. From that night on, Antanas Mockus would change my destiny too.
Mike Sperlinger
Earlier this year I came across a remarkable book by the literary scholar Elisa Tamarkin called Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (2022). It is a study of the idea and logic of ‘relevance’, in which Tamarkin calls for shifts in our forms of attention and perceptions of importance with enormous stakes. Along the way, Tamarkin engages with an extraordinary range of critics, poets, artists, philosophers, pragmatists, phenomenologists, and linguists.
Oksana Judakova
Translated by Eglė Elena Murauskaitė
Vilius Orvidas (1952–1992) was a third-generation stone-carver. Upon completing his military service in the soviet1 army in 1973, he returned to his parents’ homestead near Salantai and started shaping it into a sculpture garden – a project he continued until his passing in August 1992. It all started with attempts to rescue massive boulders from soviet land reclamation projects. At the time, boulders would typically be brought from fields to the quarry and broken apart, and lone homesteads would be demolished, with the old trees around them chopped down. Vilius would bring these field boulders and ancient oak trunks back home, piling them up, as he tried to preserve some of the antiques, all the while digging ponds and planting trees on his land. Gradually, the homestead became a sanctuary of sorts, attracting a broad spectrum of visitors – tourists, artists, nomads, addicts, and prisoners with nowhere to go after serving their sentences. These people were akin to boulders in need of saving or desert plants worn down by the wind. Vilius welcomed them all, offering food and shelter. For some, he proved instrumental in transforming their lives.
Sandro Bozzolo
Translated by Bruce Tris
It was two in the morning on a night in late May, or maybe June, and I was on a balcony overlooking the main pedestrian street, Laisvės Alėja, in the city of Kaunas. I was an Erasmus student, and a party at my house was in full swing. I remember the door opening and a stranger stepping out onto the balcony. It was a Colombian girl who had come to Lithuania from South America because she wanted to find out about the origins of a man who had changed her life. From that night on, Antanas Mockus would change my destiny too.
Mike Sperlinger
Earlier this year I came across a remarkable book by the literary scholar Elisa Tamarkin called Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (2022). It is a study of the idea and logic of ‘relevance’, in which Tamarkin calls for shifts in our forms of attention and perceptions of importance with enormous stakes. Along the way, Tamarkin engages with an extraordinary range of critics, poets, artists, philosophers, pragmatists, phenomenologists, and linguists.
