Photography exhibition “Vėjo namai” by Rytis Šafranauskas
The International Folklore Festival “Skamba skamba kankliai” takes you on a trip down the memory lane at the opening of the photography exhibition “Vėjo namai” by Rytis Šafranauskas. Aistė Jurkuvienė will accompany the audience with her voice on this journey.
The exhibition will be open at the Lithuanian Writers’ Union until 8 June.
“Brother, the Tree leaves offspring and the life leaves memories. Vincas 1974. VI. 15” – an inscription on a photograph found in the drawer of a chest of drawers in a room of an abandoned house.
It is hard to imagine that, once people have gone to the heavens, their memory of them gradually fades into oblivion over time. How many places, houses, which once held all life, stories and feelings, have become the property of the wind. It is a strange feeling to think that a person often leaves only a handful of photographs, objects that are the only ones that encode the remnants of his or her memory and make it impossible to forget his or her presence.
The theme of memory led to existential questions: what do we leave behind? What is the significance of the traces left behind in the perspective of time? I realised that, as time goes by, less and less objective memory remains. I started to question it. The further I go, the more it seems that the perception of the past is subjective. It seems that facts in the perspective of time often take on a tinge of interpretation. This is because memories are determined by evaluation through the prism of personal experiences and character traits. The patches of memory that have been erased in this way fill up with things that are not there, things that have been created in the mind, things that are distant from the original memory. The relationship between interpretation and objective memory still raises many questions for me.”
Rytis Šafranauskas is a photographer who graduated from Vytautas Magnus University in 2023 with a degree in New Media Art. Since 2024, he is studying at the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius Academy of Arts, where he is expected to graduate with a Master’s degree in Photography. In 2017, together with his family, he started to develop the “Senas kluonas” space in Zapyškis, where various cultural events are organised: concerts, plays, poetry readings, plein-airs.
The opening of the photography exhibition “Vėjo namai” by Rytis Šafranauskas is one of the events of the 2025 International Folklore Festival “Skamba skamba kankliai”. Detailed festival programme is available at: https://www.ssk.lt/programa. Festival events are free of charge.
The event will be photographed and filmed, and photos or videos may be posted on social networks or other media outlets.
