The Reader of the 12th edition of the Alternative Education Programme

Introduction

The Reader of the 12th Edition of the Alternative Education Programme is an open-source documentation of AEP’s activities, outcomes of the participants’ projects and programme’s bibliography. The reader is aimed to provide a coinciding but comprehensive introduction to AEP’s commitment to alternative learning, professional development and research. Rupert Journal was distributed as a print publication for the first time as part of the 2024 final event Wherever we are We are what is missing, a two-part performance programme at The Composers’ House in Vilnius.
Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme (AEP) is a transdisciplinary para-academic programme centred around the principles of collectivity, performativity, and criticality, embracing non-linear, decentralised knowledge. Each year, Rupert’s team selects a diverse, international group of artists and other cultural practitioners from an open call to join the six-month programme. Through workshops, lectures, research trips, peer criticism, other collective engagements, and individual mentoring sessions, participants develop and share their projects, in close relationship with Rupert’s curatorial team and guest tutors.
This year, the AEP held sessions at the Žeimiai Manor House, Akee residency in Aleknaičiai, and two weeks in Marseille, hosted by Triangle-Astérides as part of the Lithuanian Season in France. The first AEP public presentation took shape as a three-hour-long radio program on Ola Radio streaming live from Marseille. The tutors of this year’s programme were Aikas Žado Laboratory, Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, Billy Bultheel, Marie-Therese Bruglacher, Ceci Moss, Domas Noreika, Eglė Ambrasaitė, Laura Marija Balčiūnaitė, Lithic Alliance, Nabila Tavolieri, PRICE, Ren Loren Britton & Goda Klumbytė, Sara Sassanelli, Sarah Friend, Vaida Stepanovaitė, Hannah Black, and Mariam Benbakkar.
Participants

Samuel Barbier-Ficat (he/him) is a French artist living and working in Paris. Barbier-Ficat’s work as a composer and performance artist centres on edging the limits of digital contemporary composition and classical instruments, often yielding uncanny results. His work traverses sound art research, installations and performance, leaving the constraints of the concert hall behind. Through his performances, Barbier-Ficat explores the phenomenology of perception, specifically if the visual presence of the musician is a form of performance in itself.
Among his latest works and performances are Klementina for Drifts Gallery (Vilnius, 2024), Hard To Find The Wrong Way for Pushkin House (London, 2024), Live at Distance Anatomy III (London/NYC, 2024), Live at Lukiškės Prison 2.0 as the opening act for Yves Tumor (Vilnius, 2024), and Fantôme, in collaboration with Yiwen Li, for Bloomsbury Theatre (London, 2023). He has released his solo project on Untitled Records, collaborating with various artists, including Nadah El Shazly, Yraki and Yayoyanoh. He has worked across different mediums, from installation pieces with Maria Joranko to body movement and video works with Yiwen Li, exhibited in London and Beijing.
As part of the Alternative Education Programme, Barbier-Ficat is working on a collection of sound pieces titled Curtain Music. The project references the cacophony of an orchestra tuning before synchronising. Conceptually, he explores the dehumanisation of classical instrument sounds and the humanisation of electronic production, creating a simulacrum where neither is fully present and compositions cycle through continuous destruction and rebirth.

Gabrielė Černiavskaja (she/her) moves within me, shaping my boundaries, testing where I begin and end. She listens to my quiet shifts, exploring the edges of my existence, always seeking to find new forms for me to take. With her Master’s in building architecture, she sees beyond my structure, weaving together different media and insights to unlock my potential. In her practice, Gabrielė crafts me into something more than just a setting. She stretches my boundaries, fills me with new meanings and makes me a living participant in the lives of those I shelter.
Through curatorial and exhibition architecture, Gabrielė has found new methods of engaging with me—practical yet always unusual. She doesn’t merely build; she merges me with psychophysics, understanding how I can affect the minds and bodies that dwell within. With an eye on spatial politics, she unearths the power dynamics embedded in me, questioning the ways I hold and shape those who move through me.
She co-created the experimental architecture archive, Popierius. In 2022, she co-curated the symposium Politics of Space, guiding others through my layers, and showing how I reflect and resist the forces of society. As a curator for the Experiments’ Platform initiated by Architektūros Fondas and a participant of this year’s Alternative Education Programme, she has used me as a space for learning and transformation, challenging how people think about architecture.

Donna Marcus Duke (she/they) is a Nobel Prize-winning writer, performer and curator based in London. She currently holds a Visiting Scholarship in Life Writing at the University of Oxford and works as a Curatorial Researcher at Del Vaz Projects in Los Angeles. Their writing and criticism on queer and trans art culture and politics have been featured in the likes of Frieze, Numero Art, I-D, AnOther, Vogue Italia, Dazed and 3:AM, whilst their essays and fiction have appeared in various independent collections and have been published by Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers Publishing, Bittersweet Review, Worms and UCL Press, among others. They have lectured and hosted talks at the University of Oxford, the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University. They are currently developing their debut novel, Cult Trans, which explores the role of faith and spirituality in contemporary trans discourse.
As a nightlife organiser, Donna founded the performance collective Haute Mess in 2016 which showcases and promotes work by queer and trans nightlife practitioners. Working with San Diego-based DJ Acid Sally, the collective has curated events for art institutions across the UK, including at the Manchester Art Gallery and Modern Art Oxford. Haute Mess currently holds a bi-monthly residency at the renowned queer East London nightclub, Dalston Superstore. In 2022, Donna also founded TISSUE with fellow writer Sam Moore, a trans* literary initiative which seeks to showcase, publish and facilitate writing by trans people. At Rupert, they have been developing their work on renegade 70s writer Charlotte Bach, whose bold theories understood transsexuality as the thrust of evolution.

Ieva Gražytė (she/her) is a Lithuanian writer, critic and researcher whose poetic approach to the relationship between art and the market is distinguished by careful analysis of the symbolic and exchange value in a world where market forces increasingly influence cultural expressions. She delves into how digital finance influences and transforms art’s intrinsic value, providing critical, philosophical insights into the dynamics of global markets. Her work engages both theoretically and practically with the issues of human relationships and commodification in the context of markets. Through her writing, she questions how market structures shape cultural experiences, pushing the boundaries of what art critique can be in the current age. In 2024, Gražytė received the Lithuanian Visual Art Criticism Award. During Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme, she will present her project, Theory of Care.

Martyna Ratnik (she/her) is a Vilnius-based cultural worker. Her practice, spanning writing, filmmaking and curation, focuses on landscapes and their (de)colonisation, and the aesthetics of boredom and memory politics in the (post-)Soviet space and beyond. Ratnik’s work explores the tensions arising between grand narratives and the everyday, interconnected by the search for various ways history—from personal to planetary—can be embodied and transgressed. Having recently completed her bachelor’s in film and screen studies at the University of the Arts London, she is currently working as a member of the London Short Film Festival’s Selection Committee.
In the past, Ratnik has curated film screenings for Meno Avilys, an independent cinematheque in Vilnius, London’s Genesis Cinema and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her moving-image work has been screened at the National Gallery of Art (Lithuania), the European Media Art Festival (Germany), LUX Moving Image (England) and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland), among others. For Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme, Ratnik will present a looped multi-screen video work about her great-grandmother, she’s waiting for the sunset.

Ieva Rižė (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vilnius. Rižė’s practice began in painting, later developing into three-dimensional painting and sculptural installations. She has also explored performance, becoming a member of the Butoh movement and physical theatre troupe Okarukas (2016–2018). She currently works with video, sculptural objects and performative practices, often incorporating text, sound and drawing. Her work explores the human psyche, relationships within closed groups and themes of identity and power. Rižė’s creative approach is characterised by a quest to reflect the themes of her works through poetics and symbols, and the performativity of text, bodies and their interaction. She is intrigued by the space in between—inanimate substances, life forms, people, objects and concepts themselves—exploring the dependencies and tensions that tell a story. The aesthetics of her work are often shaped by short- or long-term creative rituals and impulsivity, resulting in an abstraction that evokes the archives of individual imagination.
Rižė graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts with a bachelor’s in monumental painting and scenography with Konstantinas Bogdanas and a master’s in contemporary sculpture with Deimantas Narkevičius and Laura Kaminskaitė. In 2024, she began her PhD studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. In 2020, she joined the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association and was granted the status of art creator by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. Her work has been exhibited in Vilnius at Medūza (2023), the Contemporary Art Centre (2021; 2020), Drifts Gallery (2022), Atletika Gallery (2021) and Skalvija Cinema (2021), as well as at SpLab (2018) in Aarhus, Denmark, and Auditorium Saint-Germain (2017) in Paris. During the Alternative Education Programme, Rižė is exploring vulnerability through voice and autobiographical fiction while uncovering the paradox of the personal yet fictional story.

Markéta Slaná (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from Czechia whose work navigates the liminal spaces between the grotesque and the sublime, post-ironic detachment and the enigmatic terrain of digital landscapes. Her practice, centred in performance and installation, creates space where feelings of dissociation, the numbing cadence of doomscrolling and the search for meaning converge. Slana simultaneously embraces the absurdity and mundanity of a hyperconnected yet disconnected world, offering a nuanced reflection on the complexities of modern existence where the search for meaning, success and connection becomes both a game and a deeply felt struggle.
Slaná graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague with a thesis focusing on ‘vibe’ as a worldmaking substance. Currently in residency at the Delfina Foundation in London, her work has been featured in exhibitions at the National Gallery in Prague, Museumsquartier in Vienna and the Brno House of Arts. As part of the Alternative Education Programme at Rupert, she is developing a performance project encompassing themes of middle-classness, suburbia and the home as an ecosystem.

Greta Štiormer (she/they) is a Vilnius-based theatre director and creator of interdisciplinary art and contemporary opera. In her work, she concentrates on the topics of queerness, fictionalising textual and performative approaches to musical performances, formation of queer-feminist processes and involvement of community-based principles. Štiormer graduated in classical piano and music theory at the Conservatory of Music. She graduated from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre with a bachelor’s in theatre directing with Eimuntas Nekrošius and later completed her studies in sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Arts.
As a theatre director, she has presented her work in venues and organisations such as Operomanija, Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, National Academy of Dramatic Art in Paris, cheLa exacta in Festival Nueva Opera Buenos Aires, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, Meno Fortas Theatre, Kaunas Artists’ House, Vilnius State Small Theatre, and many other site-specific locations. Štiormer is a participant and local coordinator of the Great Little European Network theatre connections programme. She is also a creative and interdisciplinary writing teacher and facilitator working with queer youth. She has initiated a queer performative arts platform, Vaivorykštės miuziklas (Eng. Rainbow musical), and is currently involved in the creative process as a stage director. Štiormer also graduated from Beth Morrison’s BMP: Producer’s Academy in 2023. At Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme, she is working on chants embodying a queer and homoerotic approach to grief.
A Conversation with the 2024 Rupert Alternative Education Programme
THIERRY Do you feel like there is something different about this AEP group?
IEVA R. Somehow, yes. I felt safer than with my usual bubble. I remember that beautiful day when I arrived at Žeimiai and met everybody. I was afraid that nobody was going to be partying or drinking. It was enriching to bond through some vulnerable situations. That calm atmosphere was blooming in all the different activities we did.
MARTYNA Speaking of that bond, before Rupert, I struggled to find connections with people through language. I remember telling my best friend I needed people to be silent with. At Žeimiai, we had a weird moment on the steps where everybody was quiet for ten minutes. It was a really rich and beautiful silence; we were all on the same wavelength. I felt I was in a collective but in a way that doesn’t make you lose your individuality. In a group, sometimes you let go of who you are.
DONNA I have been in residency spaces where I was included in a group of people who might not have felt super secure in their work or themselves. I think it’s this lack of security that produces egos, friction and clashes. Here, when we first presented our work, everyone was really impressive. There was a really strong idea of what people were doing, why they were here and what they wanted from this process. There was genuine intrigue and desire to hear, listen and learn from each other. That combination produced the bond between us.
MARTYNA I was thinking about this quote from Vaida Stepanovaitė’s workshop, ‘All properties are loss because it is the loss of sharing.’. In the real world, there is a clear sense of where I end and where you begin. At Rupert, I am not sure where I end and where the other begins, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Thinking about loss, what happens when our identities become fluid? What kind of possibilities does that open? I feel the space asks for that to come into focus.
THIERRY How did it feel to start these collaborations in that space, to start projects that you did not plan to originally pursue?
MARKETA With Ieva G., there were a lot of overlaps with our practices and some interdisciplinarity we thought was fruitful. We started recording sounds that money made and I felt inspired by her analytical thinking around the topic of exchange value. We had commonalities not only with the topic but also with certain sensibilities.
IEVA G. Although we share the same field of interest, our way of working is very different. The methodologies we use are also unconnected, but we saw it as a chance to work on broader creative forms.
SAMUEL For our collaboration, Ieva R. asked and trusted me to make the music for her video, which was exhibited at the fourth show of ‘Dream Belly-up (Dog or Fish?)’ at Kaunas Artists’ House. She sent it to me three days before the show! [the group starts laughing] It was a fast process because we couldn’t overthink the final result so it was very free and easy. It was a good match.
IEVA R. You sensed it really well because, even if we could’ve had more time, I wouldn’t have liked to discuss the sound a lot. I couldn’t even create the fantasy of what I got. It’s not important to discuss and sand the corners but to find where you click. When we did a listening exercise on your sound with closed eyes, I understood you were a person I’d trust.
THIERRY There was also a collaborative workshop led by Greta and Donna surrounding queer grief. What did you get from that experience?
GRETA I was really happy about that workshop. The group created some texts and it got me thinking about the process, including this year’s themes. Why did I start thinking about grief? It’s a really powerful word; you have to be in a certain state to talk about it. This workshop got me thinking about what I really wanted to do here. I think that’s why, when Goda asked me, ‘What will you do?’, I simply answered, ‘Chants.’. [laughing] It just popped into my mind. I read Donna’s text before and it was like we were already collaborating in an ephemeral way.
DONNA This text was me writing about the process of my father dying and about the last eight days he was in the hospital. I read this before at the workshop led by Ceci Moss. I think, especially when writing about grief, the best thing that can happen is when someone else reads it and finds something shared in it. Grief can be incredibly isolating so to invite productivity through loss is the best thing that can come out of grief. Especially in this sociopolitical context, these questions of collective grief feel more important than they have in a long time.
THIERRY How does the ephemeral nature of your work help to explain that grief?
DONNA [hesitating] Well, writing is almost always something that tries to make something live longer… [emphasising] it almost tries to fight against ephemerality at all costs. Ephemerality comes in when performance then tries to re-enact the text, the medium where writing can be shared the most effectively. The attention ephemerality requires raises the stakes.
IEVA G. For me, everything is ephemeral, from the form of my writing, with words as the bricks of my stories, to my field of research. I am in a constant search for intrinsic value as something essential and for symbolic value as something ephemeral and fugitive in itself.
GABRIELĖ The themes I’m working on here—addiction, spatial mutilation, disabilities—I feel are sometimes too… ‘gooey’ for other people to come into easily and quickly. That’s why I was trying… not necessarily to sink everyone into this dark liquid… the themes are stigmatised. I’m still thinking about the boundaries people need to cross to get into it.
THIERRY Do you think people at the AEP ‘got into’ your practice?
GABRIELĖ I think mostly no, but that’s an interesting insight for me.
[the group goes quiet]
DONNA Would you like us to?
GABRIELĖ The door is open…
THIERRY Do you feel sometimes forced to explain yourself, when it comes to your practice and its reception?
SAMUEL It’s not my job to explain music and art. My practice is centred around conceptual compositions and performance so I feel like I would be doing a disservice to the audience by limiting the infinite interpretations of my music, which is actually very important to my work. Every person experiences and digests sound differently. I want to encourage that as much as possible.
DONNA When people ask me how it was moving to Lithuania, I usually answer that I was shocked by how easy it’s been. The ease doesn’t stop. I knew a lot of older Lithuanian people in London who told me, [pointing disapprovingly] ‘You’ve got to be careful, you better not dress the way you do!’. Personally, I’ve got more issues when I was back in London!
MARKETA Everybody was like, ‘Wow, you are so unhinged, moving to Vilnius for six months!’. [the group laughs] But the scale of it makes it a really nice community and I never felt any danger.
THIERRY Do you feel like you’ve transgressed something while you’ve been here?
DONNA [laughing] Are you transgressing? In the city, maybe a little bit, when I get stares, not out of animosity but more like, ‘What is this?’. Maybe there is some transgressing happening but it doesn’t boil down to my trans-ness. Maybe it’s actually more about my English-ness and my Western-ness.
SAMUEL I found the contemporary art scene in Vilnius uniquely transgressive in its practice of inclusivity and accessibility. In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve been tapped to collaborate and perform multiple times on diverse projects, like opening for Yves Tumor at Lukiškės Prison 2.0 or creating a performance at Drifts Gallery. There is a fluidity in the interactions of the artistic community here that is so refreshing and, ultimately, inspiring.
IEVA R. It was really funny when you invited us to your flat and we were wearing those scarves. [sarcastically] A French guy living in a Soviet bloc on the land of an old school and enjoying it?
MARTYNA I do romanticise it a lot myself. I grew up in that sort of neighbourhood so it feels a bit like home. There is always this friction. I work a lot with decolonisation in post-Soviet space and it somehow feels like I’m both romanticising it and recognising that I grew up within the ruins of this failed imperialist project. Conceptually, that’s my playground.
THIERRY How do you feel about Rupert’s space?
SAMUEL I love the forest around Rupert and how it’s green in every room. It’s far from everything. There’s this… quietude. You can concentrate, it’s not like being in the city when it’s so loud.
MARTYNA We’re like parasites. [group starts laughing and nodding] It’s mostly occupied by tech bros and start-up people. We have our corner and we sort of poison the space with our artistic being that doesn’t confer all the structures most people live by.
DONNA The light is very important to me and the silence facilitates workshops. I also accidentally found out that behind Rupert is a cruising area! [chuckling] The nudist beach is tremendously inspiring. Speaking of people, having the residents around and appearing when you least expect it, and the help from the team… it just feels very supportive.
THIERRY When you’re not around Rupert, where is it that you usually reflect on your work and complete it?
MARKETA On a cloud. From the sky. [laughing]
DONNA The library. [frantically] My favourite thing is the silence, order, possibility, books, [louder] reading, focus, the erotics of the point of view from above the page, the look of someone across the desk! Baby, there is nothing hornier than a library.
THIERRY You’ve been to the British Library, right? I see you at the British Library.
DONNA Have I been to the British Library? [standing up, screaming] Have I been to the British Library? I eat in the British Library! I have sex in the British Library! How dare you bring up my home? How dare you? [group starts clapping] The British Library is my Berghain.
MARTYNA Berghain is my Berghain.
MARKETA The dance floors are the hospital sites.
GABRIELĖ It reminds me of when we were all raving to Carly Rae Jepsen.
DONNA Does anybody hold the themes closely?
THIERRY I like to reflect on the definition of traversability: ‘Traversability is an intricate interplay between potentiality and becoming; it is a moment of shimmering uncertainty, where everything feels almost possible.’.
DONNA [nervously] Can I be honest? I find that sort of meaningless. They’re very nice words together but what does that mean?
GABRIELĖ Finally, someone said it! I think in any format of alternative education, it’s a lot to try and fit within certain themes. It’s always trying to make something broad but, if it’s broad, why do you need it? Now, we see the themes are coming out… but trying to squeeze something out of these two words?
IEVA R. I was thinking about it—how to concentrate on the process. But then, there’s the final event. That’s how the framework works, your body feels tense when somebody tells you to relax. ‘Oh my God, it’s the end of November, I need to present something!’. I think that tension is actually really inspiring. How do you create this result, not being focused on the result but on the process?
DONNA What do you think are some words that have come up in preparation for the event?
MARTYNA Loss.
DONNA [to Marketa] Meta-irony!
MARKETA [to Donna] Safety, danger! But yes, meta-irony is showing something and not knowing if it is true or not, compared to post-irony where it’s genuine. We live in a world of meta-irony now, unable to distinguish whether something’s a joke or not…
THIERRY How do you feel about the final event and everything coming to an end?
GABRIELĖ It’s a cycle, these things have happened before and they should continue.
MARTYNA I will need a schedule for December, to fill the void left by your absence.
IEVA G. Definitely, AEP was such a back-to-school experience. I can’t wait for the prom. Although I’m sure we’ll stay in touch with coursemates and Rupert.
GABRIELĖ We will need therapy for separation issues.
MARTYNA I was thinking how during the final event at the Composer’s House Marketa’s robotic vacuum cleaners will be cleaning Ieva’s mother’s carpet and Samuel will be conducting music spilling into another room. That’s how I visualise our work merging and becoming one.
DONNA I’m excited to announce I’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Tutors
Ceci Moss

Ceci Moss (United States) is a curator, writer and educator with almost twenty years of professional practice organising solo, group, touring, and online exhibitions, as well as public programs, performances and screenings, in museums, galleries and artist-run spaces. She currently serves as the Director and Chief Curator of the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego, a non-collecting institute for contemporary art with a five-decade history of presenting innovative exhibitions in the context of a major research university. She also holds a dual appointment as a Professor of Practice in the Department of Visual Arts, where she teaches courses in Museum and Curatorial Studies. Previously, she was the Founding Director of Gas, the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organisation Rhizome, and Special Projects Coordinator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from U.C. Berkeley.
Ren Loren Britton & Goda Klumbytė

Ren Loren Britton is a trans*disciplinary artist and researcher tuning with practices of critical pedagogy, trans*feministtechnoscience and disability justice. Playing with the queer potential of undoing norms they practice joyful accountability to matters of collaboration, disability access, Black feminisms, instability and trans*politics. They love slugs, slowness, reading, repetition, examining non-linearity and experimenting towards greater accessibility.
Goda Klumbytė is an interdisciplinary scholar working between informatics and humanities & social sciences. Her research engages feminist new materialism, posthumanism, human-computer interaction and algorithmic systems design. She co-edited More Posthuman Glossary with R. Braidotti and E. Jones (Bloomsbury, 2022), and published work in journals ASAP, Digital Creativity, Precog and others.
Together Goda and Ren have collaborated in academic, creative and speculative writing projects, such as performing material experiments with cyberfeminist practices for computing, writing about slime mould, critique of technocapitalism, and performing algorithms otherwise.
Lithic Alliance

Lithic Alliance (Belgium/planetary) is a more-than human collective predominantly working with the lithological realm and the energies and vibrations that emerge in this mineralized entanglement. Their research digs into the ecological and geopolitical foundation of co-existence, animisms and the rights of nature resulting in multifaceted projects that investigates connections spanning over vast temporalities to identify phenomenological correspondence and queer kinship.
Tom Clark

Tom Clark is a curator and writer. He teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London and Manchester School of Art and has worked on curatorial and publishing projects internationally. He submitted his PhD Thesis in Art, Curating and Infrastructure at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2022 where his research explored infrastructural figures, politics and imaginaries as they relate to critical practices in the institutions of art. He has been editor at BAK, basis for actuelle kunst, Utrecht (2015–2017); co-director of the self-organised project space Arcadia Missa gallery, London (2010–2015); and his writing has been published in collections published by Sternberg Press and Bloomsbury Academic.
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, aesthetics and queer, pleasurable, interspecies futures. Ama is a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), and a Research Associate at VIAD (University of Johannesburg). Ama’s wider intra-disciplinary work thinks through sustainable ecologies of care and more-than-survival for BIPoC women and queer folk in the arts and academia. Ama’s writing was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize, she has had essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and has been exhibited across Europe. Ama is also in the final stages of her PhD at Birkbeck University of London; is a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick); a participant of the first Postnatural Independent Programme (Madrid); and was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with Bard College (New York). Ama’s work has been translated into Twi, French, German and Swedish.
PRICE

PRICE, a dynamic force, has pioneered numerous musical ventures, releasing his innovative creations through esteemed labels like cazarnagora and Latency. Beyond his creative pursuits, he has shared his wealth of knowledge, conducting workshops and lectures at esteemed institutions worldwide, from the Art Academy in Ghent to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. As the guest curator for Les Urbaines festival’s performance program in Switzerland from 2017 to 2021, and one of the curators of the visionary art space Lateral Roma, co-founded in 2020, PRICE has left an indelible mark on the global arts scene. His distinctive works are a symphony of elaborate soundscapes, avant-garde costumes, and collaborative stage designs that challenge the audience’s expectations. Playing with the dichotomy of artificial and authentic, his performances span various spaces, from the theater stage and clubs to digital realms and the fashion runway, offering a unique exploration of social norms and the (queer) self. PRICE’s art is a celebration of failure as a queer strategy, a rebellion against assimilation and rigid identities, embracing the complexities of the (queer) body and self in the digital age.
Sarah Friend

Sarah Friend, an artist and software developer from Canada and currently living in Berlin, Germany, brings a fusion of creativity and tech expertise to the global art scene. In 2023, she served as a research fellow at the Summer of Protocols, under the guidance of Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation. The previous year, she shared her knowledge as a blockchain art professor at the esteemed Cooper Union. Friend’s impressive portfolio includes exhibitions and collaborations with renowned institutions such as MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), bitforms (NYC), Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo), Rhizome (NYC), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), showcasing her dynamic presence and contributions in the intersection of art and technology on an international scale.
Aikas Žado Laboratory: Domas Noreika & Eglė Ambrasaitė

Aikas Žado Laboratory is a contemporary art device, constructed in Žeimiai Manor House. Aikas Žado Laboratory is organized as an individually collaborative artwork by the artists Domas Noreika and Eglė Ambrasaitė, as well as a communal artwork. Part of its programs are administered, coordinated and developed by the Aikas Žado Association. The main activities of the Laboratory are practical experiments related to the management of cultural heritage objects and the combination of discoveries, methods, techniques and knowledge in the fields of contemporary art, science and culture. The main principles of the Laboratory’s activities are illustrated by the application of conservation, prevention and restoration systems in the Žeimiai Manor House. At the Laboratory, the team collects and tests historical materials, organizes scientific research and exhibitions, and presents cognitive expeditions that showcase specific solutions and methods of turning the Manor House into a contemporary artwork itself.
Billy John Bultheel

Billy John Bultheel, a vibrant force straddling Berlin and Brussels, defies musical norms as an experimental composer and performance artist. His creations seamlessly weave contemporary vibes with the rich tapestry of European Medieval and Renaissance polyphonic traditions. Breaking free from the concert hall shackles, Bultheel transforms musicians into dynamic performers, immersing them in site-specific experiences with architecture, sculpture, and bespoke instruments. In 2020, he co-founded the modular band 33, dropping their debut album ’33-69′ in September 2021 under the eclectic London/Berlin-based label C.A.N.V.A.S. This ever-evolving duo, featuring a lineup of diverse talents, has electrified European stages and is cooking up their second studio release. Bultheel’s journey also includes a captivating collaboration with performance artist Anne Imhof since 2012, adding his unique flair to her immersive exhibitions. With a background in composition and performance studies, Bultheel’s art pulsates with life, resonating across genres and breaking down artistic barriers.
Marie Therese Burglacher
Born 1991, Maria Therese Burglacher works as a freelance curator at the interface of performance, music and the city. The focus of her work is the critical potential of live performance to translate built and established structures into new spaces of experience. She studied Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths University and art history and philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Since 2019 she has been directing the performance and music program Disappearing Berlin at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, in which artists develop site-specific works to make the potential of unused and endangered places as well as iconic architectures in the city tangible.
Sara Sassanelli

Sara Sassanelli, the Curator of Live at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and associate of CONDITIONS, is at the forefront of experimental dance and music programming. With a keen eye for emerging artists, they delve into the collective and hedonistic cultures surrounding raving, exploring how this manifests in multi-disciplinary practices. Currently steering the ship for the six-month program ‘this dark gleam’ (ICA 2024), Sassanelli is researching artists merging formal technique with social dance, pop-culture, and punk sensibilities. Their 2025 ICA program will boldly focus on the mouth and voicing as realms for the restoration of intimacy. Notable recent programming highlights include GONER by Malik Nashad Sharpe (2024), Afterlife by Louis Schou Hansen (2024), and IMPACT DRIVER by Eve Stainton (2023). Sassanelli’s dynamic career includes stints at Tate, Goldsmiths, and the Royal Academy of Arts, along with programming events at prominent venues like Somerset House Studios, Southwark Platform, and Fierce Festival, showcasing their expertise in shaping groundbreaking cultural experiences.
Nabila Tavolieri

Nabila Tavolieri is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the University of Naples L’Orientale. She is investigating, experimenting with an undisciplined approach, the articulation between communitarian urban movements, cultural politics, and popular education in Bogotà, Colombia. For her research, she has been engaging and conspiring with alternative educational and communitarian projects to understand how a decolonial rethinking of traditional education can be envisioned. She completed her master’s degree in Cultural Mediation at the same university, specializing in Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature, with a thesis focused on radical black female ‘thought-praxis’ and Afro-diasporic artistic experimentations. Given her diverse academic background, she is particularly interested in employing a multidisciplinary theoretical and critical framework, encompassing Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Critical and Popular Education Theories, Cultural Studies, Feminist Philosophies and Black Radical Thought.
Vaida Stepanovaitė

Vaida Stepanovaitė is a powerhouse in the fields of organization, research, curation, and writing. As a PhD Candidate in the Advanced Practices program and an Associate Lecturer in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, Vaida’s academic pursuits focus on the desire to forge collectives under challenging conditions and navigate evolving forms of togetherness. Collaborating with Prof. Irit Rogoff, her practice-based research titled ‘On a Shaky Tightrope: Collective Subjects, Communal Selves’ is actively disseminated at esteemed institutions like the Royal Danish Academy of Art, University of Copenhagen, and Goldsmiths College. Recently presenting at the AICA Congress ‘Contested Infrastructures,’ Vaida is set to publish a book chapter based on her research in the upcoming year. With over a decade of active involvement in self-organized fields, she played a pivotal role in establishing the Art Workers’ Trade Union in Lithuania, advocating for art workers’ rights and fostering dehierarchised solidarity within the visual art community. Formerly the Head of Artnews.lt organization, Vaida continues her multifaceted contributions, including co-facilitating a chapter of the Choreographic Devices event in Vilnius on August 3, 2024.
Laura Marija Balčiūnaitė

Laura Marija Balčiūnaitė’s artistic practice, like herself, is wandering and observing life and society. After studying sound therapy in London, the artist now shares her knowledge in Lithuania. Laura works with the multi-layered human body, from the cosmic and erotic to the natural and self-loving. Through drawings, psychogeographical maps and sound performances, she explores sensual energy, passion, the need for tenderness, and the magic that transcends the human body and the senses. She explores notions of health practices, the relationship between sound, drawing and motion, as well as design and myth, approaching the aesthetics of fluidity from feminist and queer perspectives. Laura’s practice is guided by the belief that collective memory is stimulated and healed through stimulating the collective body. She uses automatic drawing and somatic movement in her work, while materials such as crystal bowls or petals help her navigate new forms of tenderness, revealing and exploring vulnerability.
Mariam Benbakkar

Mariam Benbakkar is a French-Moroccan photographer, video artist, author, performer, and curator who, since moving to Marseille 10 years ago, has immersed herself in the city’s archives to give decolonial tours. She is co-founder of the activist collective Filles de Blédards, with whom she regularly organises events surrounding postcolonial imaginaries in France in collaboration with emerging artists. For the past two years, she has been co-writing for the Histoires Crépues series “On Discute,” showcasing contemporary debates on racism and discrimination in France.
Hannah Black

Hannah Black is an artist and writer based in Marseille and New York. Recent shows include Marked by a Blank or Occupied by a Lie at Octo in Marseille, Bad Timing at Den Frie in Copenhagen and 2020 at Fitzpatrick Gallery in Paris. She is the author of two small books, Tuesday or September or The End (2022) and Dark Pool Party (2016). She is represented by Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery in Berlin and Arcadia Missa in London.
Wherever we are We are what is missing
JL Murtaugh & Goda Palekaitė

One morning in late October in Marseille, it’s so warm that we’re still wearing t-shirts. We grab espressos to go, squeeze onto a crowded bus, and hurry through the quartiers nord to reach the entrance of a warehouse-like building. Bullet holes stipple the concrete walls. There’s no sign, but someone opens the door—they’ve been waiting for us. We’ve arrived at Le Polygone Étoilé, the ‘star polygon’. Behind this enigmatic name lies a community of radical care and transparency.
For twenty years, this experimental cinema space has created, shared, and discussed film with some of the city’s most vulnerable residents—the inhabitants of the quartiers nord, an area even the police do not enter. Triangle-Astérides, our hosting institution, is also located in the north, at La Friche la Belle de Mai, a former tobacco factory. The majority of that factory’s workers have historically been children—their tiny fingers were more suitable for rolling cigarettes.
It’s no coincidence that the epicentre of this year’s Rupert Alternative Education Program became its two-week residency in Marseille. This is a city of contrasts, radically Mediterranean—dazzling, unsettling, charming, desperate, inspiring, exhausting, decadent. In its lush, wealthy outskirts, we cross paths with wild boars and foxes. In the noisy city centre, the dealers operate around the clock with the backdrop of French colonial grandeur, now covered in the slurry of social segregation. This place is all about identity, displacement, memory, grief, illness, addiction, upbeat tempos, cacophony, uncanniness, wealth, legacy, delusion—and hope. These are all keywords suited to the practices of this year’s AEP participants.
And yet, the sun is always shining. Marseille welcomes us, as it has long welcomed people seeking answers. Etel Adnan (1925–2021), who once wrote, “Wherever I am, I am what is missing” in her poem The Arab Apocalypse (1980), also lived here. Her Lebanese voice of loss, destruction, and hope, echoes in our present moment. It is easy to lose sight of the world and focus on cultural funding results or art-bubble gossip while sitting in a Scandinavian-style riverside artist residency. This is precisely why we must step outside that frame—to return to wherever ‘home’ is for us, with fresh, perhaps even aching eyes, and a broader, decentralised field of vision. This is what we consider education.
Wherever we are We are what is missing is not only an homage to Etel Adnan, Marseille, and the extremes of today’s world. It’s also a riddle, an invitation to embrace the ephemeral, to disappear in the haze, to sing publicly for the first time.
It is a deliberate choice to hold this final event for the 2024 Rupert AEP in the Composers House, the home of the Lithuanian Composers Union and a landmark dating back to a difficult history. It is a monument to idealism in the face of tyranny, the power of creative voices, the value of collective labour, and a domestic sanctuary that welcomes all visitors. We could not imagine a more appropriate location in Vilnius for the practices of this year’s artists. This venue bears significant meaning for the role of public institutions, the importance of artistic process, and the politically fraught moment where we all stand, simultaneously, as witnesses and participants.
You might find yourself, like Greta Štiormer, reinterpreting lines and filling the gaps in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of humanity’s oldest surviving literary works. Written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, most of the epic poem is missing. Greta’s practice delves into queer grief and community-building, using Gilgamesh’s incomplete format as a scaffold for performed hermeneutics apprehended through homoerotic experiences.
Or, like Markéta Slaná, choreographing a ballet of robotic creatures, perpetually cleaning the house. Marketa’s humorously banal scenarios explore the interplay between the grotesque post-human body, meta-irony, and the transformative potential of digital mysticism.
How do we assign value to labour and representation, for example in the arts? Marketa and Ieva Gražytė assembled a collection of songs and sounds representing money, spinning endlessly on a compact disc like the wheel of fortune—a hyper-pop mix including computer game soundtracks, TV series themes, and bitcoin mining. They emphasise the siren charms of capital exchange through post-Marxist sarcasm.
This is Ieva’s G. expertise—as an analytical writer on the commodification of value in the arts, spirituality, and finance. Her Theory of Care is embodied in a sentimental piece of family property—a carpet her mother won at a casino while pregnant with Ieva. This work is a reminiscence of the dystopian times of scarcity in 1990s Lithuania, as the country experimented with the value of goods, property, and laws. Wherever we are now, aren’t we nostalgic for that radical unknown that went forever missing?
Martyna Ratnik, too, is busy with memory or the blank spaces within it. She narrates absence, displaces the centre-periphery of historical discourse, and trivialises politics in ways that reveal its absurdity. In her poetic piece, She’s waiting for the sunset, the love and life story of Martyna’s Babushka is distilled into a single page and a short 16 mm film, transforming a family archive into a grand narrative that captures the bizarre forms of oppression under Soviet ideology.
A multimedia artist and musician, Samuel Barbier-Ficat knows the conceptual freedom of hybridisation between disciplines. In a concert with, and for, the wrapped grand piano, he performs the role of a conductor interpreting the classical format as a spectacle. Confounding audience expectations and prescribed forms of performance, he confronts the inevitable twin pressures of personal fate and societal tradition, placing himself on the brink of disaster yet striding confidently and purposefully toward the unknown.
In manifesting her quest to understand the life of Charlotte Bach, a mercurial personality, radical thinker, and challenging political contradiction, Donna Marcus Duke possesses powerful courage, composure, and energy. Her aptitudes in theatre, communication, and writing are critical investigatory tools to commune with a complicated character in Bach; who believed she would receive the Nobel Prize for discovering that transness is the driving force of evolution. In her performance lecture, Donna previews their own Nobel Prize laureate speech, given Bach’s posthumous ineligibility.
Vulnerability and affliction are critical mediums for Ieva Rižė, straining the limits of her autobiographical voice and personal fiction as mortal prompts to stimulate repressed intentions, beliefs, and actions. Is rehearsing self-love enough to yield equivalent pleasure? As our bodies and minds struggle to adapt to social media and artificial intelligence, is ‘fake it until you make it’ a viable strategy or a recipe for emotional collapse?
Gabrielė Černiavskaja works with exposure conditions and intimate voices in crippled space. Grounded in architectural practice, she probes the spatial consequences of addiction and dependence, at personal and societal levels. For Gabrielė, spaces are bodies, with a nervous system affected by habit and substance. Our psychological and physiological responses to these normally disregarded margins reinforce how social dynamics are collectively actualized.
These two days of events at the Composers House are an enthusiastic conclusion to the 2024 AEP programme. Its prelude was a public presentation on Marseille-based Ola Radio, where the participants explored ways to translate their research into sound alone, collaboratively composing a three-hour live program. However, this coda arises only after six months of forging a community of trust built from the moment of their arrival.
Our initial, informal meeting in Vilnius the night before the programme officially commenced was cautious and tentative, like in all new relationships. Several international participants were still in transit. Surprisingly, even the Lithuanian contingent did not yet know one another well. However, it was clear from those first moments that the intangible qualities and potential vibrations we hoped to see from this group were already beginning to crystalise.
Assembling in the railway station early the following morning, the remainder of the participants arrived. With each person’s appearance, our momentum began to gather. A long, noisy train journey followed, deep into the countryside. We exchanged coffee and introductions in a mobile housewarming party blended with a game of musical chairs.
We spent the next few days at the Žeimai Manor House cooking, walking, and introducing each participant’s practice and research topics. Here, the resonances we’d recognised in their proposals, and hoped to cultivate over the months ahead, became immediately tangible.
The group is remarkable in its unquestioned openness, communication, honesty, and support. They transformed quickly from a gathering of individuals to a functioning cooperative, all while retaining and refining their unique identities. It’s fair to say it’s been an unusual time for the AEP—and Rupert in general—but these artists’ resilience, optimism, and realism give us energy for education’s purpose and the future of artistic work.
It’s in this spirit we present Wherever we are We are what is missing, a meditation on the distinct practices of these artists and a reflection of their communal dynamism and thematic fluidity. These two days invite you to join the group in their temporary home, to share their emotions and hope. Here is a provocation of intimacy and frankness, a pronounced resistance to weaponised fear, despondence, and ethical vacancy.
Exhibitions, publications, films, and performances are not singular or isolated, they are points on a continuum. This event is not a conclusion, it’s a statement of intent.
Gabrielė Černiavskaja
Me and them
(‘me’ as a space; ‘them’ as addicts)

I’m no passive observer. I bend, shift and breathe alongside those who occupy me. When addiction seeps in, I unravel—not just around them but with them. Boundaries blur and what once made sense fractures. The roles, functions and clear lines all dissolve. I mirror the chaos inside them, reshaping under compulsions I wasn’t built to hold.
There is no neutrality. I am shaped by what fills me: power, intention and, mostly, the people within my skin. When addiction grips them, I can’t help but change. I deform, stretch and twist. My inner spaces, once orderly, become sites of confusion. A kitchen becomes haunted by rituals, shame seeping into corners. Meanwhile, a bedroom, once peaceful, turns into a barricaded refuge, shut off from the world. My identity fractures with theirs, twisting into something unfamiliar.
I don’t stand by, I respond. I shift under the weight of addiction. My walls, floors, skin and nails, even the light I once let in, all change. I absorb compulsions like permanent scars. There’s no malice here, no evil in the dysfunction. But I become something new—a place where old purpose falls apart, and something raw and alive starts to emerge.

I struggle, too. Just as their bodies lose control, I falter. My purpose slips away. But this breakdown isn’t destruction—it’s transformation. Living rooms grow hollow, the life drained from them. Bathrooms, once private sanctuaries, become hidden spaces for compulsions. Unsettled and strange under its weight, I’m patched together by addiction; a patchwork of disorder.
I wonder what happens when I can no longer fit the lives I once held. When addiction distorts not only their minds but the way they move through me. Everything shifts. Clutter becomes a landscape, closets turn into archives of need. The light that once filled me is now blocked, windows covered, shutting out the world. I lose parts of myself but in doing so, I become something else, something new.
Other spaces (other me) have a skill to resist this. Public places, designed with sharp edges and unwelcoming benches, push people away. But I absorb. I shift to accommodate the chaos. Piles of clothes become new surfaces, corners turn into refuges. Despite the dysfunction, I offer a strange kind of acceptance.
As I change, I ask myself: am I merely holding this chaos or am I shaping it too? When addiction grips the bodies within me, I develop my own disorder, a slow decay. I break down, not alone, but with everything around me. The clarity of the outside world begins to erode, my distortion seeping into nearby spaces, erasing their order.

I remember everything. The bodies that passed through me, the compulsions that reshaped me—I hold it all. There are no ghosts but the marks remain. Addiction leaves its trace and in my distorted form, I offer a kind of resistance. I no longer follow the rules imposed on me. I push back against the very design that shaped me.
I’m shaped by the suffering within, just as much as I shape it. My disintegration, like theirs, leaves scars that are difficult to erase, even after the bodies are gone.

Donna Marcus Duke

EXCLUSIVE
Donna Marcus Duke is interviewed by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist after becoming the first artist to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Her award-winning research disproved Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by helping prove the work of 1970s fringe theorist Charlotte Bach, who believed evolution was caused by sexual transgression, particularly transsexuality. In Duke’s first interview after winning, Obrist gets the hottest gossip on the latest transsexual evolutionary theories, what art research even means and why delusion is so in right now.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: So Donna, massive congratulations. Could you tell us a bit about what led you to your latest Nobel Prize-winning discoveries?
Donna Marcus Duke: Oh my god, thanks, Hans. Yeah, it’s kind of unreal. Basically, I was going through the archives of the Gay Liberation Front at the London School of Economics for a writing project about the UK’s counter-cultural scene in the 1970s. I came across this one box filled with strange diagrams and accompanying notes suggesting Darwin’s evolutionary theory was wrong and the answer could be found in transsexuality. The archivist told me these notes belonged to Charlotte Bach, a fringe Hungarian transsexual thinker who was based in London, and that there were scores of boxes of her unpublished work in the archive that no one had ever looked at. Going through her papers, what I read was staggering—her complex theory interweaved biology with mythology, erotica, mysticism and philosophy, concluding evolution was not propelled by ‘survival of the fittest’ but by ‘survival of the most deviant’. For Bach, transsexuals were the most deviant of all and demonstrated the most concentrated example of how the mechanics of evolution worked.

HUO: Could you tell us a bit more about the ‘survival of the most deviant’?
DMD: Darwin downplayed the importance of cultural and social forces in the process of evolution, whereas Bach suggests evolution arises from a subject’s internal conflicts that occur when one deviates from social norms or when one’s desires conflict with tradition. She calls the ensuing internal crisis the ‘anomalous impulse’, and it’s through these impulses, where people struggle with their roles or identities, that new forms of social behaviour emerge. And this, by means of epigenetic social structures, manifests physically over generations and affects the broader evolutionary course of humanity. She extends this as a framework to understand the evolution of the entire universe and, though my collaborations with physicists are promising, we’re waiting on data analysis to prove this. Personally, I’m excited by the social consequences of this theory—Darwin’s thought has excused the worst of capitalism’s cultural dominance, and I’m excited to see how these discoveries might motivate social policy in protecting deviant members of society. For me, this is the most significant part of proving Bach’s theory.
HUO: It’s incredible that such a seemingly radical theory has been accepted by the hard sciences. As an artist, how did you manage to bring your art research together with scientific data?

DMD: At first, I thought Bach’s writing was just a provocative re-imagination of the world; her theories hardly cohered to the Darwinian science we all culturally understood as true. As a joke, I presented the theories to some old friends working in the Biology Department at the University of Oxford because I was curious to see how they, as ‘serious scientists’, would react. But when they told me that Bach’s work matched up with the latest epigenetic data sets they’d produced, we started to realise these fifty-year-old theories might be right. We knew this discovery was big but none of us—being in our 20s and 30s—expected to be recognised with Nobel Prizes so early in our careers.
HUO: So how did your methods as an art researcher allow them to see what they were unable to as scientists?
DMD: Delusion. When you undergo art research, when the traditional frameworks of scientific study are discarded and you’re left to find your own processes of putting information together, everything can feel so pointless. At least in science, the meaningfulness of your work depends on how it coheres with set epistemological structures. Art researchers, who resist such traditional frameworks, are far more dependent on vibes, and meaning and purpose are often only retrospectively identified. The aim of the process is often so nebulous that a position of delusion is necessary to keep going—tell yourself that it matters until it does. Without delusion, the uselessness of labour is unbearable. But also, without delusion, the possibility of Charlotte Bach’s theories being true couldn’t have been imagined. Delusion, being the concerted belief in the not-yet-proven, is a vital and valuable methodology, specifically in art research.
HUO: Do you think Charlotte Bach was deluded?

DMD: Oh, her levels of delusion were utterly inspiring. Despite being a mainstream scientific pariah in her lifetime, the delusion of her own intellectual and social success was the fabric of her daily life. She repeatedly lied about having PhDs from Cambridge, she wrote with bullish rudeness, told anyone she met she’d win a Nobel Prize and that her theories would change the course of history. Her self-perceived genius was a way to keep herself buoyant. Without it, she faced her greatest fear: that her life and work amounted to nothing.
HUO: And you’d still call her delusional even though she’s now actually helped you win a Nobel Prize?
DMD: Yes, but that’s a testament to the calibre of knowledge delusion can produce. To take delusion away from her would be a disservice to her method; it was an essential affect in the context of her work. I think the question of what research feels like is too often forgotten. Why do we want to produce knowledge? What are the affective and erotic motivations for our work? How might answers to these questions help us understand the nature of the knowledge we produce? Perhaps I’m projecting, but I think she needed to find purpose in the absurdity of her life as a poor, ex-convict, immigrant trans-woman living in 1970s Britain. Her sexual and gender deviance felt like the world to her, so how could she articulate that in something indicative of meaning? There’s a joke amongst my community of writers in London that she made her discoveries by doing what all of us trans auto-theorists do now: placing herself at the centre of the universe, literally. Her theory that deviance, especially transgender deviance, is the cause of not just human evolution but also the evolution of the entire universe, places the utmost existential significance upon people like herself. Iconic. To varying degrees, I think this is what all art researchers do—some are just more transparent than others.
HUO: So you’re saying art researchers are delusional and self-obsessed?
DMD: The best ones are. I certainly am. Self-obsessed delusion is the key to contributing something new to knowledge artistically, it’s the belief that self-experience and personal imagination can produce something useful for how others understand the world and themselves. Without it, how can we ever deviate from unsatisfactory scientific confines? The value of knowledge—for good and for bad—can be resonance rather than truth, and I think resonance usually requires something personal. When we’re lucky, resonance can lead to discoveries that shift paradigms.

Samuel Barbier-Ficat
During my time at Rupert, I have envisioned how to bring my compositions to life and began questioning the role of an electronic music composer in front of an audience. I continue to explore whether the visual presence of the musician is, in itself, a form of performance, asking, ‘Is performance a ritual of presence?’.






Ieva Gražytė
Theory of Care

I bet this is the first and last time I exhibit this. More than thirty years ago, my then-pregnant mother visited a casino. Whether it was a legal or an illegal business is hard to say, as laws, much like private property, are quite ephemeral concepts—so is value. Money, often mistaken for value, has historically shown how useless it can be, and I’m not talking about the banal and primitive forces of inflation. Quite the opposite—I want to remind you of the dystopian times of scarcity, the times when you bet people were betting less and the biggest prizes were pieces of Japanese audio equipment brought by a sailor, red gold chains, German pornography magazines and Czechoslovakian crystal champagne glasses. In such periods, when there is nothing to exchange, exchange value reveals its vanity, and the veil of excuses that ‘there is nothing here to change’ begins to fall away.
With nothing else to do that night, my mother spent her time spinning the, obviously, no-longer-Russian roulette wheel for foreign dollars and doubling down. Doubling down is a move made by a player with a strong hand. With almost no risk in the market, a player driven by boredom from flat, empty trades has a chance to maximise the potential payout and turn a good hand into a great one. Species of opportunists, egoists, free-traders dominus and free-thinkers vulgaris are people who don’t usually have a good hand, but they won the 90s because they were the only ones playing the market.

That night, my mother hit the jackpot by winning a carpet—a trophy that immediately acquired usage value by furnishing our tiny flat. Over three decades, it built up an impressive capital of symbolic value. At least 30 Christmas trees have stood in front of this flat corpse and I’ve changed my outfit, appearance and attitude on it countless times. My mother spent hours of her life vacuuming it, which is perhaps the most primitive way to introduce the theory of labour. Now, only dusty memories are lying on these floors. There’s almost always a table on any carpet but what you bring to the table isn’t always in your good hands, no matter how long you play.
I used to put my drawings under the carpet to keep them from getting lost or curling. Looking back, I think my inability to take risks and my fear of action were compressed under the weight of this textile. Here I am, typing this text and rereading it like a stock chart. I’m good at reading charts—and rarely wrong—but I’m timid as mice under the rug. Perhaps I don’t care much about exchange value, instead, I care about changes. I might even be naïve enough to care about the changes in the world. Most of the time, though, I feel frustrated, like many cultural workers. I don’t have a strong hand when it comes to playing the market.

Tilt is a feeling of frustration and desperation that can set in when you’re on a losing streak. It’s the moment you start making irrational bets and taking unnecessary risks to win back your losses and get rich. I’m afraid of rich people—not the designer-bag rich and definitely not the I’m bored, let’s buy a monkey rich, but the law enforcement has nothing on me rich. Poker enthusiasts say tilt can be a player’s worst enemy, but it can also be a wake-up call to take a break. Yet, I’ve never seen a player take a break from the market. They play until they can’t. My mom says she wants to be wrapped in that carpet and cremated with it but like any good player, she’s bluffing.
Martyna Ratnik

Where am I?
—
I‘m back in the city I once loved, making myself a sandwich.
It’s raining here. His voice in FM starts slowly filling the room; my sandwich floats out of the frame.
There is a cable on the ocean bed. Our red-hot telephone line has a note that says ‘For emergencies only’.
This Cuban Missile Crisis is all mine so be careful now darling, don’t hurt yourself.
‘Yes?’
On air, I inhale.
‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘…who is this?’
The rain has stopped. I walk the streets of the city I once loved. I have seen this place

before, then come closer but am no longer sure.
Look back at me before you go – when you’ll turn forty, you’ll be a genius, when I’ll turn forty, I’ll be invisible.
—
The Red Sea is not really red, it’s baby blue, and it tastes of tears rather than blood.
I have white skin, white teeth and a crimson European passport. I am Moses who can part seas.
I am Moses on a vacation so I reject a marriage proposal and take a dip instead.
Oh, how I wish to one day make a beautiful corpse, as beautiful as the ancient ruins.
‘We live at the end of times, the best of times’, I hear them say.
A cut. Then I say: ‘I have seen eternal life and would like to cancel my subscription.’.
‘You have a boyfriend?’
(This priest is too old, even by my standards)
In my periphery, his secretary is reading Hegel. ‘The reason there are no female philosophers in the curriculum is because there weren’t any’. Forever a lover: amare, amator, amatore, amateur.
‘But what if a good catholic boy ever wants to marry you?’

Forgive me, Father, I would love to chat for longer but have to catch up with the Burning
Bush at five thirty in the afternoon.
—
I stand on stage, shivering. Has someone opened the window? But the windows are all closed.
My mind has amnesia. My body doesn’t.
A raven is sitting on my shoulder; no one can see him but me. Stare at me, shout at me, make me feel small, while my raven plots his revenge.
My body now knows that love is a transaction (at least for a brief moment in time, it knew how to play Schubert, too).
So be my guest, invest in me like I’m your favourite crypto, like it’s 2015, like our financial markets are forever safe from crash.
‘You have such beautiful hands, the hands of a pianist.’
She hands me her deck of cards and says she’s kin to all the witches who escaped the fire.

‘Remember, ‘How much have you loved?’ is the only question you will get asked once your time comes.’
I nod, then give my raven a look. But he’s already sleeping.
—
When my babushka wasn’t yet a babushka, she made a prophecy:
One. She will die a spinster, by choice.
Two. She will live in a way so she never has to cook or clean.
Three. She will dedicate her life to the only matter of truly great importance—archaeology.
As the camera’s eye sets its gaze upon her, she looks happy. Through the lens, a man in love is looking at her. He wants their eyes to finally meet.
‘As the glowing red sky finally darkened, the summer’s day came to an end. The round moon jumped skyward from behind the city, glancing at his own reflection in the shimmering river and, satisfied, sat down in a hammock of telephone wires. A beautiful night. We were together, just you and I. A silver light was dancing on your face. A gentle mist that at first surrounded us started to fade and then… you reached for my hand.’
It is a heavy burden to be loved by a bad poet (I’ll soon be calling the bad poet my great-grandpa). On the other side of the poem there is his portrait and next to it, a date: September 8th, 1941. 200 kilometres southeast of the shimmering river, the Ponary massacre is taking place.

In the moonlight, babushka pulls her hand and looks away. She’s in love with a ghost. Her lover hovers above the water with an 8 mm hole in the back of his head, left there by the Nazis who stole his bicycle.
On the other side of town, babushka’s mother is flipping a coin. The coin will tell her which of her two kids should be schooled now (the game is crooked from the start—the coin has tails on both sides). As brown flags in the city’s streets turn red overnight, babushka starts making lemonade.
The bad poet is now an architect. By chance, he stumbles upon a hidden treasure in a house whose owners have seemingly vanished into thin air. He’s a good citizen too, so he gives it away. The train station is repainted using the money and once the paint dries, babushka’s brother boards a one-way train there. Instead of a parquet floor, his new home has permafrost.
Babushka’s love story is a trigonometric equation: she’s in love with a ghost, the architect’s in love with her, while a nameless, female side character is madly in love with him. She decides to get rid of the competition by reporting babushka to the KGB for finding American comedies funny.

After seven months in a solitary cell and two weeks of freedom, babushka takes the architect’s last name, then buys herself a housewife manual, gives birth to a son and helps build the city I grew up in.
(I call my dad to ask when they got married. ‘She would often repeat with pride that she never lived for herself’. I ask him if he thinks she was happy. He says that her life had meaning, then adds: ‘Even if she never became an archaeologist, she knew all the Punic wars by heart.’)
Babushka will get a divorce after her husband’s mistress’ failed attempt to die from poison. With time, she will recall neither the Punic wars nor her own name. Babushka will spend her last days in a care home blaming the bad poet for the prophecy that never came to be.
…or at least so I’ve been told.
Ieva Rižė

You advised me: ‘Self-love is not possible without loving others.’.
I agreed: ‘And vice versa.’.
Within this closed system, I suffer because I am wild.
Let me splash upon myself like a crater, covering my body with a geothermal stream of
boiling sap,
let me grow like a plant, rise from or sink into the ground like a stone,
let me float, foam, whirl away…
‘I love you’, people say.
Even in the face of doubt, the words linger and certain biological elements cling for a
frantic beginning.
‘I met you on time.’, I say, ‘…and we’ve gotten to know each other on time’, I would say.
I feel the value of goods, surrounded by a fragrant skin-sleeve that protects them from
the environment. And those inside waters, fast and deep, cloudy, sticky, salty and
sometimes stagnant for too long.
I feel the value of all the weight stepping on the surface of the soil, the city pavement, my
head, crossing the limits, entering spaces and meeting others.
Bodily sensations show how grounded one can be, even when the mind flirts with fairies.
On the other hand, fantasy shows the way to escape and make the limitations of the body
disappear.
Within this closed system, I suffer because I am wild.
The suddenness of my thoughts, the grace of reality and the internet expand and contract
the world at the same time,
endlessly,
never truly at rest.
How fragile is the sense in this endless action?
I am a tiny, sensitive and vulnerable biological structure who is rubbing so much into
this world before it collapses.
‘I will call you.’, I say. I called you, you answered, but we didn’t get along. There
was a bad connection at the time, not mobile but local,
personal interference from each device.
You reacted well by saying: ‘When each of us are in our own pit, it’s not easy to talk.’.
I wanted to answer, ‘Remember the silence which does not hurt.’, but I kept silent.
Envision people splashing like craters,
growing like plants,
rising from or sinking into the ground like stones,
flowing,
foaming,
whirling away,
and in that same moment, an inhumane silence arises.
This text is like a fascia, meshing a figure. It presents all as connected
by tension,
supported by tension,
and systems as being created by tension.
Tension becomes elemental attraction in the orgy of it all.
Envision a world without people but only their things,
leftovers.
They would tell stories to nobody’s ears,
the things—detached from the words, like sparrows that flew away from a random bush.
I found a piece of paper with a question written by hand, somewhere between physical
and virtual landscapes.
It says: ‘If I eat your ego, will it be cannibalism or just a tiny sin for
techno-hyper-capitalism?’.
Markéta Slaná


Greta Štiormer
Researching the realms of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, I have realised a lot of the narrative has historically vanished. Reading every tablet, something was missing. Some sentences were unfinished, some were interrupted by silences in random places. You could sense what was said but never know if it was your imagination that put words into their places or if it was the ‘true’ story you felt your subconscious uncover. The gaps, the empty spots, the holes and silences in the text captured me more than the text itself. My thoughts spiralled from filling the gaps with secret relationships, sorrow, tears of joy and pain, homoeroticism, queerness and deleted self-observations. Every time I read the words, I started to associate them with those gaps. It was like they were there on purpose. Like they were actually meant to be there and time eventually did its job of finally uncovering them. I felt everything about them resembled the process of grieving. I found a space to grieve with those gaps. I found a space to be brave in my queerness, to be brave in my sorrow. I found space to grieve in silence, to fill my own narrative with the gaps of grieving.
On Monday, September 23rd, I sent private email invitations to participate in my workshop,
‘Grief’s work’:
To ___________ e v e r y _________friend,
To those who are with us, manifesting their creation in infinite varying forms
To those who felt that something, at some point, was _______
To those who __________ force and death _________ altogether
___________ lost or are afraid to _______
_______ who wept and ___________ ashamed of _________
To _________ not ashamed _________
To __________ willing _________ goodbyes
__________________ grieved
In the workshop, held together with Donna Marcus Duke, we discussed what it means to grieve. We made examples. Then we wrote poems on grief. And then, collectively, we made gaps in our poems. We touched each other’s texts by giving them acts of silence.
Some of the _______ will be shared below.
Greta Štiormer
To my piano ______
Svetlana,
__________________
________ tremble ________
The grossness ____ the moment
________ held on to you
For so many years
_______________ the piano
A day blinks black; blinks white,
______________ a mother—
Not romantically, ____ metaphysically,
___________ hands and _____ embrace
I miss your posture __________
__________________________
My whole music is you, ______________________
______through you
I miss how you touched my fingers
_________________________________________
Harmonies, melodies, tranquillity.
Saulė Gerikaitė
____________ with some people
___ knowing some people
Not hearing some music the way I do ____
___________ some music ________
_____________ feelings ____
Now knowing ________________ just a beginning
___________ depth ________ guilt
Now knowing the depth of _______
_______ the depth of the painful randomness in me
_______ the depth of painful randomness
Losing feeling of _______ becoming rare _____.
Domantas Bagdonas
I’m ___________________
No more _________
I wanted you _______________
________________
_____ I ______ do,
____________ able to move _______
Even if I ____ hear it, even if I ___________
Even if I ______ see
The ___________ you
Because I am _______ change
_______ here
Here _______, bitch!
______, I listen,
I see,
And I _______ pussy,
Miau, ________ wanna touch it?
Baby, ________________?
__________here
_____________________
Before you leave
Cause I ____ really care.
Donna Marcus Duke
_________ officially sold now, we exchanged keys on ______—__________ no less. Just walking now from
the ______ I was reminded of his home, that _____ of light coming through a large window, ____ from the
grass and filling the rooms my mother had _____ years ago. ______________________________—
______ it was an awkward building—constructed by an ex-colonial man, dimensions of the house held
lingering dynamics of British class. My mother _________________________—she always mentioned
the windows in what were originally designed as the _____________. Unlike the _______ of the rest of
the house—broad, long and with ____________, the windows from the staff quarters were
______________________________. My mother ____________________________________
the garden view and the rolling Warwickshire hills. It was not right, in the _______ of the colonial
architect, for the staff to be privy to the owner’s leisure time in the ground, nor for them to enjoy the
beauty of the land, ___ they forget they are working.
But my mother hated it for ______ reasons, _________________________________________.
The house ____________________________, my dad _____ getting drunk, making money
_________________________, ______________________; my mother _______________
wanted a child. My father was older and happier having fun—I _____ want to know how he managed to
convince her, or how she ____—how do you grieve a life not yet _________,
a life not _________ of dying by the virtue of never been ___________? I sometimes fancy that I turned
out the way I am as kind of divine retribution to my __________, like ________ said ‘you’re gonna have a
tranny faggot for a child _________________________’
__________________________________________________________ .
Had _________________________________ would I be here?
And if I ____________________________________________________________, for me? Am I the
lucky one for existing or was it my never siblings who _________________,
______________________________________?
___________ it’s I who should be jealous of ______.
Partners & Funding
This edition was developed in partnership with Aikas Žado Laboratory at
Žeimiai Manor (LT), Akee (LT), Triangle-Astérides (FR), and Ola Radio (FR).
Akee: Vilius Vaitiekūnas
Triangle-Astérides: Victorine Grataloup
Ola Radio: Ola Terreur (Alice)
Rupert’s activities are supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
The Alternative Education Programme residency in Marseille was part of
the Season of Lithuania in France 2024, funded by the Lithuanian Culture
Institute and the French Institute.
The 2024 Alternative Education Programme’s Final Event Wherever we
are, We are what is missing is funded by Vilnius City Municipality.
It is part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe,
co-funded by the European Union and Lithuanian Culture Institute.
Colophon
Publication Credits
Designer: Marijn Degenaar
English Language Editor: Dovydas Laurinaitis
Lithuanian Language Editor: Evelina Zenkutė
Translator: Ieva Venskevičiūtė
Printer: KOPA Printing House
Rupert Team
Director: Viktorija Šiaulytė
Curator of the Residency and Public Programmes: JL Murtaugh
Curator of the Residency and Public Programmes: Monika Lipšic
Curator of the Alternative Education Programme: Goda Palekaitė
Coordinator: Aistė Frišmantaitė
Communication & Digital Content Manager: Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė
Curatorial Assistant: Thierry Jasmin
Funding
Lithuanian Council for Culture
Vilnius City Municipality
Lithuanian Culture Institute
Creative Europe
Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action
Institut français
Tech Zity
Rupert’s activities are supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Rupert Journal
Print edition 1
ISSN 3030-1696
Brūkšninis kodas: 9773030169009
