the periglacial world

In Lithuania rocks bear various names. Many places include the word akmuo. They became inseparable from the life of Lithuanians. In the North-West of the country where they are very numerous, people are accustomed to saying that they "grow" there. The farmers gather them each year and use them for marking the limits of their fields. There have always been stone fields around the village of Mosédis. They were deposited there by the glaciers of the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Bothnia. For hundreds of years, these stone fields remained intact. But during collectivisation things changed. More than one and a half million cubic meters of stones and rocks were taken from the collective farms in the surroundings between 1975 and 1985. They were used to build the quays of Klaipéda as well as street pavements.

Mosésis Park. Photo MTP

The celebration of the stones in Mosédis coincides with the arrival on the spot of a young doctor by the name of Vaclovas Intas. From 1957, he started to choose and collect the rocks that seemed most remarkable to him by moving them in the yard of the hospital, a kind of mania that soon caught the entire city. It was after the great fire that devastated a large number of houses in 1962 that Intas had the idea of creating a park of memory to celebrate the famous personalities of the region and to call upon landscape gardeners and geologists who worked in particular on the glacial period.

It was finally in 1979 that an open air museum was inaugurated, which comprises today more than 150000 stones and rocks that go from a few grams to a few tens of tons and more than 5000 species of plants.

carved stones

The park of Orvydai is called by the authorities the park of ethno-cultural visions. Created by Vilius Orvydas, it is indeed a world in itself, like a kind of oneiric apparition in the middle of an empty landscape, where Eden communicates with Egypt, and where some monsters, comparable to those of Bomarzo, border dead trunks, carved crosses and deserted ponds, while the family of the sculptor, always on the spot, lives there in a maze whose secret it alone knows. One can really speak about a sacred space, all the more authentic since it does not result from a literary or approach but from a personal vision. Rough art under the open sky.

Orvydai Park. Photos MTP

the geographical centre of europe

The Park of Europe was founded in 1991 at the initiative of the sculptor Gintaras Karosas, when he had not yet finished art school. The idea was simple, even if it frightened a little the artistic authorities of the time: to bring to the geographical centre of Europe (according to the French Institute of Geography in 1989) a collection of contemporary sculptures in open air, thus connecting a natural space to other mental spaces of the whole world. A central sculpture indicates, like a belvedere, the direction and the distance from the principal European capitals. It is indeed a collection, but the creators all visited the place. They chose courses, perspectives. They wanted to tell a story. They sometimes decided to resort to sounds propagated among the trees and to amplify them, or even to create resounding sculptures. Collection, certainly, but collection of proposals that made of this park in the large suburbs of Vilnius a contemporary space, comparable to a certain extent to the Desert of Retz.

It is a route in itself that must be discovered, after having crossed at the entrance the greatest accumulation of television sets in the world. A manner of leaving the world of globalisation before penetrating that of imagination. A route that was built by means of true artistic collaboration, each work requiring a particular ordering of materials, an work of space alteration, a construction both mental and physical: from the seat of Dennis Oppenheim to the giant eggs of Magdalena Abakanowicz, from the pyramid of Sol LeWitt to the Bird of Europe by Zsigmond Szoradi.

Europos Parkas. Sol LeWitt, double negative pyramid. Photo MTP

Europos Parkas. Dennis Oppenheim. Drinking structure with exposed kidney pool. Photo MTP

Europos Parkas. John Barlow Hudson. Claud hands. Photo MTP

A widened European approach that restores to a geographical centre a history of art become perfectly cosmopolitan.