Since 2016, Psilikono Teatras has been exploring defunct, abandoned historical factories and creating a unique industrial mythology. Their performances come about in collaboration with the community that preserves a factory’s memory including the people who used to work there. Their stories become the basis for the performance’s script, and the characters of these stories are transformed into miniature silicone puppets. The live-animated puppets, in tandem with archival photographs, visual effects, and text subtitles, come together to create a video projection – a grotesque spectacle accompanied by live music.

Psilikono Teatras’s collection of theatrical factories includes Dirbtinis pluoštas in Kaunas, the textile factory Fábrica do Castanheiro in Guimarães, Portugal, and the miners’ shoe factory Schungfabrik in Tetange, Luxembourg. ‘Širdys ir kaminai’ brings together this industrial trilogy, as it explores Lituanica. The play, based on industrial history, connects meaningfully with the idea and architecture of the pre-war Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Crafts, and has been created especially for this place: the Psilikono Teatras laboratory, reminiscent of a shoe repair kiosk, has been installed in the great hall of the Palace.

The musical idea behind the ‘Širdys ir kaminai’ performance was conceived and will be performed live by Arkadijus Gotesmanas – one of Lithuania’s most celebrated and unique percussionists, in jazz and improvisational music. Gotesmanas was raised in a shoemaking family and has been involved in the shoemaking process himself. The production of a handmade shoe begins with the tensioning of a workpiece by hammering about 40 nails into a wooden block. Gotesmanas’s musical concept for the performance – 40 dynamic cadences of contemporary percussion, enriched with various rhythms and colours – resonates with the vividly-remembered sound of the hammering of these tacks.

Psilikono Teatras was founded by the artists Auksė Petrulienė and Darius Petrulis, who work across the fields of interdisciplinary and community art. Since Psilikono Teatras’s first projection of an artwork on the wall of a nine-storeyresidential building in Šilainiai courtyard in 2005, the artists have focused on the themes of memory and activism.

Arkadijus Gotesmanas is a percussionist, performer of avant-garde jazz and contemporary music, and associate professor at the Jazz Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. An artist with a wide musical range, he usually performs his own solo, uniquely virtuosic and theatrical compositions. Gotesmanas’s music is brimming with voices, texts, magic, poetry, novel combinations of musical instruments, and percussive sounds, not for hearing so much as for feeling.