The Druzhba project (2003-ongoing) is part of the exhibition “Borders are nocturnal animals / Les Frontières sont des animaux nocturnes / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai”, curated by Neringa Bumblienė and Émilie Villez and presented at KADIST and Palais de Tokyo in Paris as part of the Season of Lithuania in France 2024.

The Druzhba project (2003-ongoing) explores the cultural, political, and geographical territories that unfold in a fictional journey along the world’s longest crude oil pipeline, stretching 4,000 kilometers from Siberia, through Ukraine and Belarus to the Baltic States, Poland, Germany and other European countries. Druzhba, or “friendship” in Russian, is a master signifier, a grand-narrating, imperial structure meant at its inception in 1960 to “lead the world into a new dawn”. The project’s psycho-geographic readings grapples with mechanisms of power and submission that rightfully belong to the past but still persist even today.






The version of the project exhibited at Kadist was originally conceived for the Lyon Biennial in 2007. It presents an enlarged geopolitical cartoon map of Europe of the XIX century depicting power dynamics in the continent. Executed in a special technique devised by the artists, a copy of the etching is applied on a wall in a thick layer of black silicon punctuating persisting intricate interconnections of the biggest players of the region. The installation is accompanied by a moving image showing three men singing a folk song while being encircled by dancing masks of Mardi Gras. This slowed down found footage excavated by the artists at the Lithuanian Central State Archive indicates tangly ways of imperialist domination based on distorted visions of national identity.

Photo credits: Egle Marija Želvytė, Urbonas Studio
