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all images courtesy of Justyna Orlovska from her website Off the Beaten Track |
Stoniūnai is a small hamlet in the Svenciony Municipality in Vilnius County in eastern Latvia, near the border with Belarus. In 1970 the hamlet had about 50 inhabitants, but in 2021 it had fewer than ten.
One of the current residents is Albertas Žąsinas who enriched the hamlet with an art environment.
Life and works
Žąsinas was born in 1934 or 1935 and he is currently 89 years old.
He has been married twice but got divorced, and currently he lives alone in one of the six farms in the village.
Now retired, in his working life he was a veterinarian in a meat processing plant and he also worked as a teacher at a technical school. For a number of years he acted in an amateur theater.
In 1999, when he was just retired and living in the farm in Stoniūnai, he started making sculptures.
The reason for this was that he had heard that the previous occupant of the farm house had provided it with a meanwhile disappeared wooden cross. So he decided to make such a characteristic creation in turn.
And then, as often happens in the field of art environments, once started making a creation, he could not stop.
Currently Žąsinas has created about seventy characters, which he situated in the spacious garden that belongs to the farm, an exposition that can be seen from a village road.
Made from ash tree trunks, many of his creations are two-dimensional in signature, as they are formed from wooden planks. If they have a three-dimensional appearance, the lower part of the creation is often a piece of tree trunk.
Žąsinas views life with a lot of irony. For example, when he portrays a witch, she gets the appearance of such a person, but then dressed in a skirt with all the colors of the rainbow. He also looks at his own work with that irony, because on one of the yellow information boards in the garden he indicates his art environment as Homestead of Nonsense.
His sculpture garden mainly includes human characters, here and there supplemented with depictions of animals, such as various birds and pigs in a trough. All creations are treated with special oil to make them more durable.
There is a wide variety of sculptures presenting human characters.
For example, there are several creations that depict female characters, including Ingrida Simonyte, who became Prime Minister of Lithuania in December 2020. There is also a sculpture of the woman of his dreams, but she is not entirely ideal because she smokes.,,,,,
Angels and devils are also exhibited and in this respect the good forces have the majority.
As for politicians, there is a group of three in which Lenin, Stalin and Hitler got a place, all with an accompanying symbolic item such as swastika or hammer and sickle.
The arrangement of the creations in the site seems a bit chaotic, but each character contributes in its own way to what Žąsinas wanted to convey.
Documentation
* Article (July 2024) by Justyna Orlovska on her website Off the Beaten Track
* Article (December 2017) in Lithuanian newspaper newspaper 15min, with a video
* Article (February 2022) in Lithuanian newspaper Ukininko patarejas
Video
* Video (6'09") in Lithuanian newspaper newspaper 15min
Albertas Žąsinas Homestead of Nonsense Hamlet of Stoniūnai in the municipality of Svenciony, Vilnius province, Lithuania
can be seen from the road
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