April in July. A reading and conversation with Yevgenia Belorusets and Jurga Tumasonytė
Did I have any other animals in my life: camels, horses, cows?
When I grew up, I grazed cattle with my mother. I was afraid of some of them. One time, one of the cows got angry, she lifted my mom on her horns and carried her through the field. But nothing bad happened to Mama and she and the cow made up afterwards.
– Yevgenia Belorusets, Arranging Our Life Together (from the book Modern Animal)
On 7 July at 7 pm, April Writing Residency invites you to a conversation with this month’s residents – artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets and prose writer and literary critic Jurga Tumasonytė. At Pamėnkalnis Gallery, the authors will read from their latest works before joining a conversation exploring the creatures and beings that inhabit their writing, mythology and literary history, their relationship with visual language and photography, and the complex role of autofiction in their practice.
April is an international residency programme for everyone who writes: novelists and essayists, critics, editors and their magazines, performers and scriptwriters, artist-writers and, of course, poets, sometimes even ghostwriters. The residency welcomes both Lithuanian and international authors who use storytelling as a creative tool and are not afraid to experiment with text forms, language, or genre. April offers writers the chance to work within Trakai’s unique environment, delve deeper into the topics of their research and local context, familiarise themselves with the contemporary cultural scene in Lithuania and its established and emerging participants, and develop new work – whether a chapter of a forthcoming book, a translation of their own or someone else’s writing, poems or essays, performance scripts, diaristic notes, the perfect title, a magazine, or many things yet unthought.
YEVGENIA BELORUSETS is an artist and writer living and working between Kyiv and Berlin. Her work operates at the intersection of literature, visual art, and documentary practice, often drawing attention to vulnerable and marginalised communities in Ukraine, including queer families, Roma communities, miners, and people living in war-affected regions.
Since 24 February 2022, she has been documenting Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
JURGA TUMASONYTĖ Tumasonytė is a prose writer, literary critic, and creative writing lecturer. Tumasonytė explores themes of identity, memory, and everyday life, combining realistic narrative with elements of the surreal. Her literary work has been translated into French, Estonian, Latvian, German, Russian, Croatian, and English. She is the author of the short story collections Dirbtinė muselė and Undinės (Mermaids), and the novels Remontas (The Renovation) and Naujagimiai (The Newborns).
This event is organised in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in Vilnius.
The April residency programme is partially funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Partner: Pamėnkalnis Gallery
Conversation will be held in English, readings will fluctuate between Lithuanian and English.
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