Sun and Sea Listening House

Sun and Sea Listening House is a pocket-sized installation by three artists from Lithuania: Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelyte. In their collaboration, they pay special attention to the relationships between documentary and fiction, reality and poetry, breaking the intersections between theater, music, and visual art. 

In 2019, the artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelyte represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale with the opera-performance Sun & Sea (Marina), which received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. 

During the performance, the audience looked down from a balcony onto a sandy beach where relaxed vacationers lay sunbathing on towels and occasionally start singing together. They performed operatic songs with light-hearted, witty lyrics, essentially operetta, but with a serious message about the global destruction of our environment. In a humorous yet impactful way, they drew attention to the urgency of climate change.

The small, light blue-painted Sun and Sea Listening House is a compact version of this, for which the artists have set strict rules on how it should look and be used. Visitors can retreat here from the outside world for a moment. 

The house is a replica of a beach cabin where fragments of the original opera-performance from Venice can be heard. The floor is littered with washed-up waste collected from the nearby North Sea beach. Music plays from small speakers, and newspapers containing the lyrics are laid out on the benches.

Everyone who enters here is no longer just an audience member but a protagonist. Sing along, meanwhile reflect on our relationship with nature, and contemplate! Welcome to the nostalgic theater of memory, which is a lament for a lost world, a time when ecological balance was still commonplace.

Curator: Joost Bergman

Image: Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (1983), Vaiva Grainytė (1984), Lina Lapelyte (1984), Sun and Sea Listening House, 2022. Wooden cabin, metal door, sand, found objects, audio, and documentation. Collection of Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands/National Collection. Photo Studio Gerrit Schreurs