Artist:
Deimantas Narkevičius (born 1964 in Utena, Lithuania; lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania).

Materials:
Super-8 film, color, 4:3, stereo; 17 min.

Description:
The film is a portrait of the town Elektrėnai, which was built to support an electric power station in 1960. The station provided the first central electrification of Lithuania and was a modernizing life force, drawing people from all over the Soviet Union to live and work there. The film evokes an interdependent relationship between the human energy of the town’s inhabitants—at work and at leisure—and the electrical energy that the plant generates.

“Although the plant is still working, after the collapse of the Soviet Union it became a kind of museum of industrial thought and ideology. The work appears to be a reflection on the Communist experience in Lithuania as a province of the USSR, but it goes much further than that, bringing in the idea of monument, of failure, of melancholy about the past in the present and the obsolescence of the object and ideas. In order to reflect these relationships, the artist overlaps various film techniques and narrative processes.”
—Cristina Cámara Bello, “Lietuvos Energija (Energy Lithuania),” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

“The film Energy in Lithuania [sic] is a documentary study of an industrial installation (an electric power plant), which includes conversations with people who have worked there. Although the power plant is functioning, it has now become like a museum of industrial thought. Still, the livelihood of thousands of people depend on it. It will not be easy to reform industrial society. The biggest challenge is to find a credible intellectual replacement for positivist industrial romanticism.”
—Deimantas Narkevičius, “Energy Lithuania,” LUX Collection.