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TBG Food for Thought: ‘For me, to live sustainable means to slow down, look around, appreciate what I have and what surrounds me’

With our flagship project, The Big Green, we are bringing environmentally-engaged artists under one large-scale umbrella initiative and experiment with innovative ways of using art to promote sustainability. But what does it mean for us on a personal level? We asked our partners to write us a few lines about what art and sustainability and their relationship mean to them. Now, let us share Egle Kryzanauskaite’s (zusa) thoughts:

The Big Green project is a great opportunity to explore the intersection of arts and sustainability. For me, to live sustainable means to slow down, look around, appreciate what I have and what surrounds me. Such life indicates a state of gratefulness and a strong feeling that what I have is enough. It’s a willingness to reconsider ideas of progress and growth. It’s a sincere wish to care for the natural environment, for one’s well-being, human values and relationships. I do strongly believe that arts and culture is a medium that can allow us to reach such state, to reconnect with ourselves and, therefore, with nature.

Arts and culture is a broad term, yet whatever comes to our mind – painting, dancing, perfoming, writing – is a practice that we humans undertake urged by our deep intrinsic need of self-expression. I do not have to be an artist to benefit from art – I can engage with it, participate, or simply stand in silence and admire. Being open to connect with an art piece or a cultural happening is an open-ended and embodied engagement with the world, it’s opening one’s senses. Art invites us to reconsider various things, it often moves us, or simply slows us down. Whatever it does, it almost always reaches our psyche, either we recognise it or not.

We are all well too aware of the polycrisis we are in nowadays. There are hundreds of solutions proposed everyday to tackle different challenges that we ourselves created. It can get heavy, it does make me upset sometimes. Those solutions are often very concrete, yet still fail to deliver, and can make one feel very small, as if our individual efforts do not matter. Arts and culture is a less obvious and very often overlooked field in these discussions. I believe it offers multiple answers, yet first and foremost it allows us to relate back to ourselves and our surroundings. In Lithuania, my homeland, we have a saying that ‘often in the forest a Lithuanian does not know what he is crying for’ – and I relate to it very much. I do have the same feeling when I engage with arts, as well, and I wish that for everyone – to be in a state of joy, sadness, in awe, but to truly be.

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The illustration is an art installation by Andrius Mamontovas and Jolita Vaitkutė in Nida, Lithuania, called “Forrest of Coal”.

If you want to know more about zusa, visit their website.