Vernissage Augustas Serapinas. The House of Rūdninkai

The Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas (*1990) has created a new site-specific installation at the Graubünden Art Museum, the starting point of which is a historic bathhouse in Rūdninkai near Vilnius. Back in 2021, the artist dismantled that abandoned wooden house and reassembled it at a new location in Kaunas, Lithuania. For an exhibition in Holland in 2022, he converted it into a teahouse. In a next step, Serapinas burned the wood of the house to make soaps and cement bricks from the ashes. In our rooms, he finally creates a sculpture from these hundreds of bricks, which represents an impressive kiln, and installs it on the floor of an equally old house. In the eyes of Serapinas, abandoned houses, such as those we find in Graubünden, are living monuments. They tell of migration and the search for a better life. In contrast to traditional monuments, which are erected on high pedestals, these buildings usually go unnoticed. Serapinas focuses on the invisible cultural heritage by making popular traditions visible as something formable and changeable.