On Wednesday evening, June 18 at 8 PM, a public screening organised by Architektūros fondas will take place, featuring films selected by current LINA Fellows residing in Vilnius – Lucille Leger, Jacques-Marie Ligot, Diāna Mikāne, and Paula Veidenbauma. This event aims to expand on the residents’ artistic research into how time shapes urban processes, through two visual narratives that reveal how social and material spatial transformations are influenced by different temporal regimes.

The screening is open to all and is also part of the programme of the workshop “A Stadium, a Stage, a Ghost”, taking place on June 18–19.

The first film – Pacific Club (dir. Valentin Noujaïmin) – takes us to the suburbs of Paris, where in the 1970s, the newly built La Défense business district hosted the first nightclub that offered local youth a space of refuge and self-discovery.

The second film – A Passage, created by the collective “Pejvak” (Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari) – tells the story of a border region in the South Caucasus, shaped by intensive militarisation and neoliberal restructuring processes that have redefined the region’s boundaries.

More about the films:

Pacific Club, 2023 (Dir. Valentin Noujaïmin)

Language: French, subtitles – English

In 1979, the Pacific Club opened in a basement in La Défense—the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for young Arabs from the suburbs: a parallel world of dance, sweat, young lovers, and one-night romances. Azedine was one of them. He tells his generation’s forgotten story. The film’s soundtrack was created by Space Afrika.

A Passage, 2019 (Dir. “Pejvak” – Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari)

Language: Armenian, subtitles – English

“A Passage” is a film which tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. By focusing on two significant events that illustrate the dominant political shifts in the region, “A Passage” looks at how processes of rapid militarization and neoliberalization have restructured these borders. 

These two events include the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway; and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone (FEZ) planned precisely where the removed train infrastructure was housed. The scrapping of the railway symbolizes the socio-political adherence to maintaining strict mobility regimes for citizens, while the introduction of the FEZ signals how capital supersedes these bodily restrictions and borders. 

The film stitches together various contested sites of the region including Meghri’s abandoned airport (which is slated to be refurbished as the forward command of Russia’s Middle Eastern operations), a functioning Soviet-era Copper and Molybdenum mine, a 16th century church (which is the last remaining building of a village abandoned by the mines expansion) the abandoned Karchivan and Meghri train stations and an abandoned rail tunnel that bridges the geopolitical boundary of Nakhchivan and Armenia.