TRANSACTION
projcet website: http://www.transaction.lt/
TRANSACTION focuses on the search, development and realization of a scripting process for an ongoing society narrative that in the exhibition context, charts the relation between media, memory, politics and the play of traumatic identity within contemporary Lithuanian culture.
Transaction is created within and outside of an institutional context, including workshop sessions, multi-media installation, website, film archive, public events, and media production.
It started in Vilnius during 2000 by artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas and was first staged at Witte de With, Rotterdam in a dialogue with curator Bartomeu Mari.
“You are sitting and reading this book.
I come into the room and say “Hi there!”
You look up and replay “Hi!”.
We just completed a simple transaction.
A transaction takes place when I offer some kind of communication to you and you replay. It is the basic unit of social discourse.
Communication between people always takes the form of chains of transactions, which are framed in set of decisions based on the script of life”.
01 / 0.22 Mb
INTRO
The impetus of Transaction project is based on the interest to construct a model that charts a reading of the transformation mechanism in society. By addressing the present-day concerns, Transaction employs shared recollections of media to deconstruct a script, through which a reflection on the state of “transition” is developed. The work is programmed as construction site to subvert existing narratives to operate within a further scenario.
Transaction was provoked by an interview with Dr. Raimundas Milaðiûnas, a Chief Psychiatrist of Lithuania, head of the Mental Health Center in Vilnius, who stated that Lithuania is living through the “script of a victim”. Historically, the notion of “victim” has been a recurring one in the Lithuanian psyche, has been repeatedly translated through different media. According to Dr. Milaðiûnas, Lithuanian society is today having to confront the difficulty of coping with a new reality; individuals are floating between “what is no longer and what is not yet”. This unfixed, unpredictable period of transition leads to an overall sense of unease.
Transaction refers to Transactional Analysis (TA) a method applied in psychiatry that involves the notion that there exists a “script” that has been developed and fixed as an operating set of rules during early childhood. A psychiatrist works with the patient to “cash their memories” and uncover the script in order to access the patient’s “script beliefs” and to recognize the origins of the problems that affect them.
In the context of TA, “transaction” means the flow of communication between people. The communication that is based on manipulation is called “a game”. Whenever people play “games”, they step into one of the three scripted roles: “persecutor”, “rescuer”, or “victim”. The diagram used to analyze these games of communication is called the “drama triangle”.
The idea of the “drama triangle” brings to Transaction a model of three-way dialogue in a type of game format. The three agents constituting economy of communication within Transaction – “women”, “film”, and “psychiatrists” refer to the construction of a “drama triangle”. The model allows no one agent a permanently fixed role rather it charts the routes of the movement between them.
The standpoint of Transaction becomes the possibility of discussing one particular role in the game, that of a “victim”. Transaction focuses on feminine scenarios that are socially constructed and formed through history, enclosing with empathy and misogyny in the “world that belongs to men” according to Vytautas Þalakevièius, a Lithuanian film director.
WOMEN INTERVIEWS
02 / 1.14 Mb
Women intellectuals are approached to engage a collaborative form of discussion to investigate women’s scenario aiming to decode the script of a victim. Within the framework of meetings and interviews that constitute this invisible network of women, a map of personal and mediated scripts is plotted. Through the format of interviews, Transaction accesses the references to film that women make to facilitate their personal stories and narratives. What they recognize in these screen memories is not the precise form of the constructed environment but an acknowledgement of the communication structures that we inhabit.
Psychologist Rûta Baèiulytë raises the question of the interest in an absence of female voice and fills this void with a suggestion to meet Dr. Marija Auðrinë Pavilionienë, founder of Women Studies Center at Vilnius University. In her interview, Marija Auðrine starts from a personal story to describe how the interests in English women’s literature guided her research through language theory into feminism, implying the understanding of the repression apparatus. Dr. M.A. Pavilionienë advises to meet her colleagues and collect a series of interviews and written contributions that later would become a statement to form a current reflection on a scripted space. The suggestion is followed by a snowball effect of meetings and contributions mostly with representatives of women activists, who through their personal experience and activity were able to set themselves free from a script. This weaves the network of individuals and institutions, disciplines and interdisciplinary experiences, narratives and references to media, women scenarios in Lithuanian history and nowadays society.
Þivilë Pipinytë, a film critic, furthers the search for a script by leading it to the concerns of an artificial space constructed by ideology in the world of film. This notion haunts the space during further investigation providing references and charting the character maps in Lithuanian cinema. The mapping of the artificial space encloses Transaction within a theory that sustains the articulated development of a model, as being in between two realities.
Dr. Viktorija Daujotytë supports the weave of theoretical insights with her contradictory suggestion of the importance of women experience that underpins the personal story in oral history rather than an imported theory, referring to Lithuanian writer Julija Þemaitë,* who never studied a theory of feminism, although during her visit to New York at the beginning of last century was perfectly at home within most of expressions of feminist theory of that time.
Language theory and feminist issues, artificial space and notions of victim, scripting techniques and ideology, types of characters, whether real or mediated, all nodes of the network establish a transactional process, where women exchange roles between themselves and other players in the game. The specific archive of film brings together the process of different readings introduced through the references made by women interviewed.
03 / 1.14 Mb 04 / 0.34 Mb
05 / 1.14 Mb 06 / 0.34 Mb
Participants:
Graþina Arlickaitë / film researcher, Daiva Budraitytë / musicologist, Auðrinë Burneikienë / lawyer, Zita Èepaitë / writer, Solveiga Daugirdaitë / literary critic, Viktorija Daujotytë / philologist, Patricija Droblytë / philosopher, Karina Firkavièiûtë / musicologist, Jolanta Gelumbeckaitë / philologist, Rûta Goðtautienë / musicologist, Erika Grigoravièienë / art critic, Veronika Janatjeva / musicologist, Margarita Jankauskaitë / art historian, Laima Kreivytë / art critic, Zita Kelmickaitë / musicologist, Eglë Laumenskaitë / sociologist, Indrë Mackevièiûtë / student, Dalia Marcinkevièienë / historian, Marija Auðrinë Pavilionienë / philologist, Þivilë Pipinytë / film critic, Rima Praspaliauskienë / historian, Birutë Purvaneckaitë / student, Giedrë Purvaneckienë / educologist, Daiva Raèiûnaitë / musicologist, Daiva Ðabasevièienë / theatre critic, Ugnë Siparienë / journalist, Lolita Sutkaitienë / journalist, Marta Vosiliûtë / stage designer, Anelë Vosiliûtë / sociologist / Sonata Þalneravièiûtë / music historian, film critic, Audronë Þukauskaitë / philosopher
* THE WRITER
Þemaitë is Lithuanian writer (1843-1928), the only women, whose image appeared on the nominal of one litas (Lithuanian money), which was the banknote of smallest value (0,29 EUR).
FILM ARCHIVE
07 / 1.14 Mb
Following the women’s references and cinematic recollections, Transaction approaches “film” as part of a collaborative scheme. The film archive of Transaction consists of more than fifty Lithuanian films, mostly dramas made between 1947 and 1997. With the support of the women interviewees, the Transaction archive unearths copies of postwar Lithuanian films which are difficult, if not impossible, to find today. The character of the project is constantly modified by the contributing participants. With the evolution of its shifting structure, therefore, the notion of the film archive finds its logic in the freely overlapping layers of script and voice.
The drama is the most common form of narrative in Lithuanian film, where women, as in reality, live in a man world. Film as a document proves that the institutional world legitimates only the defined and de-personalised script for women, and this is the script of a victim.
08 / 1.14 Mb 09 / 1.14 Mb
10 / 1.14 Mb 11 / 1.14 Mb
Most of these films were produced in the ideological currents belonging to the Soviet period. Lenin’s slogan on cinema as “of utmost importance of all the arts” was furthered by Stalin’s statement: “cinema is illusion, although it dictates the life its own laws”. Having lived in a single-ideology based mass culture that scripted the space of the “Homo Sovieticus” there is the question today as to what could have been “authentic”, from product to state-of-being. In respect of this, there was a sense of exile developed as an inner state of mind, consciously isolated from the surroundings, a mechanism of self-preservation on the whole that elaborated with it an “Aesopian language”.
Transaction deals with this “Aesopian language”. This refers to a way of speaking that begins as a necessarily disguised communication that abounds with allegories, metaphors, and double meanings and leads to a point of no return, often making it impossible to grasp the sense of the real issues being communicated. In respect of this communication mechanism, Transaction aims to retrace and open up the route in which these choices of representation of reality feed ourselves back as echoes of the distorted communication between the “image” and the “being”. By rewinding the tapes, Transaction returns to reality, defining the present through key moments of the past.
download .zip 3.28 MB
Women writers, linguists, semioticians, music theorists, singers, activists join the Transaction project to investigate the role of woman’s voice in the construction of a “victim scenario” pertaining to the Transactional Analysis philosophy. Trying to find the body in the voice and isolating it in some utopian pleasure they decode the dichotomy between sound and voice, voicing and language, “becoming” and “being”. Through the shared recollections of media they build a pathway to navigate from the past to the present. The resulting “voice archive” reflects a social construction and metaphysical qualities, featuring sets of samples ranging from speech and narratives to chanting and singing.
Participants Rûta Baèiulytë, a psychologist, and Rûta Goðtautienë, a musicologist/semiotician, suggested two methods of re-collecting the voices. These methods stem from two simultaneous perspectives. The first develops from the construction of social and behavioral patterns that constitute the present state of mind of the transition period, whereas the second re-routes the initial search from a discussion on the timbre of the voice to writing and on to weaving, where the concept of a soundscape finally grows into a garden of language.
Lithuanian patriarchal tradition has framed a space for the muting of women’s voices; a space that understands weaving as writing, followed by singing as a way of storytelling. This performative aspect was employed by ideologies to make the woman’s voice represent the motherland, or later to signify consumer society. While it can be said today that the contemporary spirit of women producers also focuses on the voice, it is a voice in which the oral works to reclaim meanings occupied by a patriarchal society and liberal ideologies.
PSICHIATRISTS SESSION
12 / 1.12 Mb
Although historical experience suggests the institution of psychiatry as being instrumental for ideologies to isolate and package voices, Transaction suggests a role for psychiatry as a connecting medium between individuals and the collective body, society.
Psychiatrists are approached and the media recollections are fed back to a therapy room where a patient’s script is reconstructed from mediated characters. By watching the films on a TV screen, analyzing and commenting, psychiatrists are then shifted from the “drama triangle” role of “rescuer” to that of “persecutor” in defining women’s script in Lithuanian film. There is a linked game in the project that begins with positioning the camera and letting the viewer choose between these roles of “rescuer” or “persecutor” in relation to the institution of psychiatrists, leaving a space for the role of the artists in a welcomed game.
13 / 1.12 Mb 14 / 1.14 Mb
The model of collaborative discussion between individuals and institutions, feminists and psychiatrists, facilitates a paradigm for the analysis of script that is based on the invisible territory of dispatches; it becomes a kind of “unpacking” of closed off memories and voices. Transaction provides the audience with a mediating space, a “library” that is structured as an unfolding box through a system of signs.
Participants of Transaction sessions: Rûta Baèiulytë / psychotherapist, Raimundas Milaðiûnas / chief psychiatrist of Lithuania, Raimundas Alekna / psychiatrist, Dainius Pûras / psychiatrist, Eugenijus Ðarovas / psychiatrist – all members of Transactional Analysis Association, Lithuania.
Transaction sessions took place at the psychotherapy room of Mental Health Centre, Vilnius in April 2000 and 2002.
http://www.transaction.lt/
15 / 0.57 Mb 16 / 0.63 Mb
17 / 0.57 Mb 18 / 0.55 Mb
The Transaction web archive invokes the notion of a script to stage sets, roles and psychological subjects, which are rooted in the subconscious or repressed constructions and modeling visibilities at play within the structure of a web presence. The archive starts from the opening of a box that transforms into a ride through a virtual model based on the architecture of the “drama triangle”.
The trinomial structure of the “drama triangle” unfolds as a stage set in the shape of a spiral staircase, offering with each step shortcuts and links to virtual spaces, inhabited within the key moments of characters in negotiation with their prescribed roles. Here the interface operates within transactions amplifying the pattern, framework and technologies at play. What the model of “drama triangle” allows us to do here is to analyse how the scripts link, how roles in a game interact with each other. And how the movement within the flow and patterns of information is folded and embedded into further patterns.
The spatial construction of the architectural model contains interviews with women, film archive and voice archive and psychiatrics sessions caught up in arrays of complex movements. These develop between the roles into the three layers: “transaction”, then “transmute” and “vox”. The archive operates with and within the scripting, as movement that charts through the diagram, along the shape and outline of a victim scenario.