Anastasia Vekshina

Anastasia Vekshina (Russia) is taking part in Artists-in-residence programme as well as participating in the project “Travel Agency” at KCCC. Anastasia is residenting in Klaipeda: 2014 10 01–10 20.

″Movement″ is a project (24 10 2014–09 11 2014) by Anastasia Vekshina (Russia) that consists of poems (KCCC Arts and Crafts Courtyard art, Bažnyčių street, 4) and a video work (KCCC Exhibition Centre, Didžioji vandens street, 2). In her artwork, Anastasia Vekshina interprets the movement as one of the natural human needs.

MOVEMENT

Movement is one of the basic human needs, among the others: eating, breathing, moving.
Being homesick for a variety of locations.
While on the way, feeling as if one was in the safest place ever.
Having prepared for one‘s uniform for traveling: a suit with a veil, an eye mask, a small blanket.
Falling asleep for 22 hours, with the exception of customs.
Intentionally choosing the long route with many changes, so that one could go to visit friends living in the points of change.
Riding from Budapest to Katowice in a car loaded with pepper, and come just in time for the Old New year.
Standing at the hotel window, listening to the ventilation and observing the empty night streets.
Settling and clearing the snow from the roof with a wooden spatula meant for frying.
Carrying items.
Returning.

Anastasia Vekshina (born in 1985) is poet, translator, philologist and journalist. She graduated from the Russian University of Humanities, Faculty of History and Philology. She has her PhD at the University of Tartu (Estonia), and was winner of ″Ilya″ literary prize in 2004 and the International Poetry Competition Castello di Duino (2009, 2010). In 2008, Anastasia was nominated for the Debut Prize for poetry. She currently lives in Gdansk, Poland.

Anastasia Vekshina‘s poetry involves looking around, paying attention to the details of daily life painting, that we do not usually notice. The world of her poetry is characterized by the fact that Anastasia describes not the daily life in Moscow and not the poets in the capital, but Poland and the Baltic States: the sea, the night-distance buses, traveling from one city to another, and the people. In her poems, grandparents ride bicycles or mopeds, on Sundays, Catholics slowly go out of the church, and a grandmother in Pskov, Russia is waiting for her grandson to come back from Sweden.

According to literary scholar Alexander Polivanov, ″apparently, this is what the poetry of a happy province should be, and it does not matter if it is European or Russian poetry; of the province that lives as if without knowing that somewhere, there is a literary process going on, there are literary reputations, poetic games with reminiscences, and pseudo-quotes, that somewhere there is postmodernism and even criticism of postmodernism. Even with its alleged provincialism, Anastasia‘s poetry seems more European than the works of many Moscow poets.″

The residents involved in ″Travel Agency″ are proposed to reflect on the Klaipėda region and the city, to write journals and keep their ″route accounting″, which equates the residency to a travel agency engaging in cultural journeys. The project highlights the quest for Utopia in architecture, as well as in the time slip, gender and national identity.

Photos by Algirdas Kubaitis

Video (text by Anastasia Vekshina, camera and montage – Donatas Bielkauskas) >>

The project is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.