Pabaiga

The ‘television snow’ inter-channeled images are actually photographs of derelict homeless ‘insane’ alcoholics beautifully blind-drunk on vodka (petrol) lingering in the snow on the streets of Vilnius and Didžiasalis (a small town of shadowy tower blocks on the Belarus border, a semi-deserted/abandoned place in the snow, a haunted zone left over from the nuclear age of the Cold War… a place filled with feral cats, empty apartments and alcoholics).

The gallery that I did my residency with in Kaunas gave me two bricks of old expired medium format Soviet film from the early 1980’s… so I used this mixed with expired 35mm film. Almost everything from the expired Soviet film, as mentioned above, didn’t come out, but what did come out are these graphics as you see here (and in the book towards the end), this ‘televisionised snow’… this ‘death’… this ‘end’ (Pabaiga means ‘the end’ in Lithuanian)… however, the original image, the images I photographed, are still there as far as I’m concerned… but have been transmuted into the invisible… there, lurking beneath the surface, latent but unrealised/unformed/frozen/trapped/fossilsed…

Olivier Pin-Fat (1969) was born in Norfolk, England, but now lives in Italy. From 1997 – 2008 he was a member of Agence VU and Galerie VU in Paris. In 2012 he set up the collective ‘AM projects’ along with artists Tiane Doan na Champassak, Gert Jochems, Ester Vonplon, Daisuke Yokota, and Aaron McElroy. Pabaiga has been released as a book by Éditions du LIC.