Agnė Narušytė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/MIS/2024.16.3
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, historians, political scientists, and other commentators all over the world started discussing and visually demonstrating the similarities between the current war and WWII, as well as the apparent repetition of previous events in the present. It has also been noted that we are observing a duel between the present and the past, prompted by this war, that will cause systemic changes leading the civilization towards an unknown future. An important issue is how we can distinguish which currently emerging phenomena are echoes of the past and which ones are harbingers of the future. Particularly since Russians started their war by glueing stickers saying: “We can repeat” (Можем повторить) on their cars, and their leader, president Vladimir Putin, wrote essays and books grounding the necessity of war on an arbitrarily chosen historical period when Ukraine as a state did not exist. This seems to be a realisation of “restorative nostalgia” described by Svetlana Boym in 2001.
Such an unstable geopolitical situation encourages artists to join the discourse and reflect on the parallels of the past and the present. With his performance Is There a Source Over There? (2022), Dainius Liškevičius pondered the repetitions of history. The performance took place in the lobby of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre around the sculpture Source by Stanislovas Kuzma, created in 1981 and installed in the middle of the fountain pool. By wrapping it and covering it with a canopy, Liškevičius referred to the actions of Ukrainians trying to protect their public monuments from Russian bombs. But the performer also seemingly received an impulse from the Soviet-like image of Putin broadcasted on television, which prompted him to revert to aggressive behaviour. The article discusses the performance as the artist’s indirect answer to the question bothering many observers of the current war: if this war is a repetition of the past war, how can we understand its causes and how can we influence its order of events?
Keywords: Dainius Liškevičius, Svetlana Boym, restorative nostalgia, Stanislovas Kuzma, war, Ukraine