The Lithuanian word stebėjimai translates to “observations,” but also witnessing and monitoring. The project stems from Lithuania as a borderland between East and West Europe, situated between the russian-controlled territories of Kaliningrad and Belarus. Living in this narrow corridor of the European Union means existing in close proximity to the frontlines of shifting power. The ongoing war in Ukraine has resurfaced fears of occupation and the lived realities of occupation that my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents lived through.
In recent years, a quiet yet collective form of vigilance has emerged across the region. Civilians have begun to watch the sky, documenting and interpreting atmospheric changes as signals of geopolitical tension: the hum of fighter jets, the white traces of planes heading east, the sonic tremor of military drills. Looking up has become an instinctive gesture, one that carries both fear and agency.
This contemporary gaze upward is not religious or transcendental – it is pragmatic, anxious, and communal, yet the gesture carries ancient traditions and meanings. In Stebėjimai, I want to explore this act of looking up, I hope to understand the sky as both an extension of landscape and a new space of collective attention, one that mirrors our hopes, fears, and the inherited memory of living in a borderland.