About the installation

World Premiere

Be Vardų, Be Kojų: Traces is an immersive, interactive installation born from ongoing research into the creation of a queer Lithuanian folk dance tradition. Beginning in 2022, the project used photogrammetry to capture dancing bodies performing four traditionally female-coded and four traditionally male-coded Lithuanian folk dance steps. The resulting 3D scans glitched, giving rise to an alternate virtual reality inhabited by queer alien figures performing their own version of Lithuanian culture.

Using the body as a bridge between past and future, the installation invites participants to walk the path of one of eight original folk dances while witnessing their movements reflected by the surrounding alien figures. As soon as visitors step onto a path, they begin rewriting the dance, replacing its prescribed steps with their own gestures and movements.

In doing so, each participant queers the folk dances from which the project originates and becomes an active contributor to the creation of a new, collective queer folk dance tradition.

About the artist

Brigita Gedgaudas^CA is an emerging shapeshifting, trans*, diasporic-Lithuanian artist working in so-called Toronto weaving together a life-long engagement in Lithuanian folk culture and training in Punking/Whacking/Waacking, vertical dance, and new-media art techniques. Reconciling the dissonance between their restrictive cultural and expansive gender identity, Brigita's work finds home in glitching as a generative error to imagine a future-queer-Lithuanian tradition.

Be Vardų, Be Kojų: Traces by Brigita Gedgaudas co-presented par InterAccess

Presented by InterAccess