Changing the Climate

Changing the Climate unfolds within the Vytautas the Great War Museum—a monumental site of Lithuanian nation-building, conceived in the interwar period when Kaunas functioned as the country’s temporary capital. Designed as part of a broader modernist complex alongside the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, the building embodies the convergence of militarisation and culture: hard and soft power staged side by side as instruments of national identity.

Throughout the 20th century, the museum’s architecture and its surrounding square were repeatedly re-scripted by successive regimes—nationalist, Soviet, and Nazi—each replacing symbols, monuments, and displays to project its own ideological order. The site operates as a scenographic apparatus, where national emblems are mobilised to produce collective memory and incite belonging.

Within this charged setting, Cibic stages a performance centred on the allegorical figure of Europa. A group of Kaunas-based artists forms a choreographed body in the museum’s central hall, positioned between dominant symbols of nationhood and continental identity. Standing behind easels and encircling an empty pedestal, they draw a figure that is not present—attempting to reconstruct Europa from memory, according to its canonical description in Iconologia by Cesare Ripa.

Focusing on Europa’s attribute of the temple—an emblem of cultural authority and the architecture of power—the performers translate this symbol into speculative drawings of contemporary Lithuanian forms. These imagined structures, held metaphorically within Europa’s grasp, expose nationhood as a constructed image: continuously staged, revised, and performed.

Through this choreography of absence, Changing the Climate reveals how art, architecture, and display operate as tools of ideological production—where the visual language of the nation is repeatedly rewritten to align with shifting political climates.