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16 / 11 / 02 – 15 / 12 / 02
Exhibition / Films / Talks / Performance

Ruta Remake (2002)
Nomeda und Gediminas Urbonas (LT)

"Women's Interviews" (Excerpts)

"Ruta spielen und hören", Otto Kränzler
"Ruta Remake" Main Page

Perhaps the difference is between the voice you have inside, the one that is solely yours and is only heard by you, and the one heard by others, which you yourself then start hearing. It is the latter process that constitutes socialization. The latter voice becomes an expression of human socialization, the distance, which you have to cope with. Of course, you lose your inner voice to a certain extent, since you no longer hear its strangeness. And with recorded voices, especially if you listen to some old records, you can hear the socialization as a kind of time‑buzz, noise, because, after all, voices of different epochs and voices of different people are marked by time …

Rasa Kalinauskaite, journalist, Vilnius

… What is interesting, is that at that time voices radically changed, the ones used in Lithuanian music; those of our cultural heroes changed quite radically, too. Such heroes help to express, embody, create, and construct different individual and cultural identities. It is characteristic that especially women's voices totally dominated the creativity of the 70s, the music we still consider valuable and significant to our national tradition… There was a change in the very type of woman and in the voice with which she relates her identity. We can say that the woman‑mother type practically disappears. She remains a character with some slight importance for pop music during that period. We can remember many such works, addressed to a mother, who is staying somewhere far away…

Ruta Gostautiene, musicologist, Vilnius

I find it remarkably beautiful when women, especially in Dzukija, say and emphasize that it is so important to sing outdoors. Voice only resounds in the forest. For instance, a Samogitian would never say that. Because the forest in Samogitia is gloomy, dark, whereas in Dzukija the pine forest is splendid. And when for instance they say they are setting out to pick mushrooms, they tell you they let their voices go so far that it can be heard at a great distance. And sometimes you think this is the connection between humans and nature... So I ask her, why is it so easy to sing in the forest, why is it so important to sing there? She says, because in the forest you let your voice go so far that the trees can hear you. So that listening and the echo is very important to them. Then I ask, wait a moment, do your also sing? No, she says, I sing alone. Because when I do, someone else will pick my mushrooms for me. So on the one hand this is individualism and on the other, it is a sort of dialogue with nature. Someone is always listening to you anyway…

Zita Kelmickaite, musicologist, Vilnius

… That natural, elemental voice of mine, with no involvement of consciousness, that metaphysical "I", not the voice I use when I speak internally with myself, which doesn’t even have any characteristics of voice, perhaps even less of thought … ? But it comes out on rare occasions in life. And I have heard it once in my life, when I gave birth to my child. It was the only time I ever heard my normal voice, not embellished, not transformed in any way. So this is the feminine voice, as they say, so ugly, we may say, but so natural. So this is the moment I remember, although it didn’t exactly happen in my childhood.

Veronika Janateva, musicologist, Vilnius

In other films woman is good as long as she does not speak. Ideally, woman should not speak; she would do better to die in the same way as she appears on screen. Then it happened in the film Feelings ‑ there were a man and a woman, she gave birth to twins, a kind of a double reflection, and she left; so he stayed with the twins and a cow and then the real story started.

Laima Kreivyte, art critic, Vilnius

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