In May 2018 Kaunas Artists’ House will continue its artistic residency series by hosting artists and curators Paulina Drėgvaitė (UK/LT) and Nick Wood (UK). During their residency the artists will establish an open studio within KAH in which they will be developing My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, a new artistic collaboration exploring the notions of failure, boredom and waste. Combining differing backgrounds from both film curation and contemporary art this new project hopes to explore interests within counter cultures, defining anti-productivity and alternative modes of archiving. Viewing YouTube as an archive of everyday micro-histories, this project aims to locate alternatives to the notions of success and productivity that dominate societal discourse.
By exploring the underbelly of YouTube we discover the people sharing their individual knowledge and experiences to an audience that is indefinable yet omnipresent to them. These videos explore everything from shopping trips to family birthdays, hair dying to local ferries; and they seemingly sit perfectly alongside music videos, archive footage and live streams from the UN. By positioning these videos on a horizontal plateau YouTube allows us to effortlessly jump between a multiplicity of moments, experiences and ideas. This enables us to extract new meaning from the familiar and safely experience the unfamiliar, offering an intersection between the public and the private. This platform is an enchanting archive of secret wishes, confessions and failures both public and private.
My soul knows my meat is doing bad things invites you to a YouTube party like no other. Abandon watching those tutorials and never-ending cat videos in private – curate, explore and join Paulina and Nick.
My soul knows my meat is doing bad things on Tumblr
Paulina Drėgvaitė is an essayist and film curator based between Kaunas and Edinburgh. She has recently concluded an MSc in Film, Exhibition and Curation at the University of Edinburgh. As a writer and an academic, Paulina employs an interdisciplinary practice to interrogate the narratives of gender, trauma, memory and archive in the field of film.
Nick Wood is an artist and designer based in Edinburgh. His practice aims to unpick the the accidental nature of human intervention and collaboration. Currently projects include ‘Untitled Gathering’ – a ubiquitous non-hierarchical collective which meets to dissect and question the nature of collaboration with the aim of working together harmoniously.
