Women's Voices. Stories from Kaunas textile industry

The sound installation was created as a collaboration with the artist, researcher, and curator Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė. Installation was a part of audio - visual exhibition under the same name at the Kaunas Picture Galery in 2023."The exhibition reveals the multi-voiced narratives of women who worked in Kaunas textile factories during the late Soviet era and the first decade of independence. It is a polyphonic narrative: people's stories, and memoirs surrounded by the soundscape of artist Ugne Makselytė. Although the historical textile factories in Kaunas have disappeared, their interiors, the sounds of their machines, the smells they emitted, the chemistry of the fabric dyes, and the images of the steam have remained in the imagination, dreams, and memories of the women who worked there as a background. In it, the women's lives, the twists and turns of their careers, and the relationships of the work team are intertwined, intertwined, or interrupted, just as they are today, but in a different way.The stories of eight women who worked at Drobė, Kauno Audiniai, and Litex - ten hours of documentary collected by the exhibition curator Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė - have been transformed into a 55-minute audio composition. It is a kind of fiction, like radio theatre, a play about work and feelings towards work, machines, and materials.For their sincere stories, openness, and trust, the creators of the exhibition are grateful to former Kaunas textile workers Janina Gobužienė, Elea Šliužaitė, Brone Valienė, Brone Jastromskienė, Agne Macke, Aldona Laucaityte, Irena Rinkšeliene, and Aušrute Juškevičienė. Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė - artist, curator, researcher.Her practice and research are based on the methodologies of human history, feminist ethnography, and the theory of social reproduction. Agnė is currently working as a curator at Kaunas Artists' House, and participates in the activities of the social centre Emma, the 1st of May Trade Union (G1PS), and the leftist media platform Life is Too Precious.Ugnė Makselytė graduated from KTU Music Technology in Kaunas. She works in the fields of experimental electronic, dance, and ambient music, in soundscape composition, and interdisciplinary projects combining sound art and literature. Ugnė is interested in the experience of everyday ritual through soundscape, outdoor recording art and acoustic ecology, dance, movement, and poetry music, as well as various vocal experiments in compositions.The exhibition is presented by the community platform Small Stories, which since 2017 has been exploring industrial memory and labor histories in the exhibition series Big Industry.