UNSEEN UNHEARD

Concept
Unseen, Unheard (Nematyta, negirdėta) is an audiovisual installation that explores the stories of Vilnius’s queer community, examining their visibility and invisibility within the urban environment. The project is built on the principles of documentary audio-theatre, constructed from personal testimonies and urban soundscapes of the places they tell us about.

In this virtual documentary, you will hear the personal stories of 9 queer people, taking you to 14 locations across Vilnius. 

Sound Architecture & Spatialization
The sound architecture is a vital layer of this installation, developed during an international residency in Paris in collaboration with the French National Center for Musical Creation, La Muse en Circuit, and composer Alexandre Menexiadis. The installation will utilize a quadraphonic sound system. This four-channel spatialized audio allows the audience to physically experience shifting voices and urban acoustics, submerging them into the locations of the testimonies.

Visual Language & Technology
The visual projection relies on photogrammetry technology—the three-dimensional scanning of actual locations throughout Vilnius. These scanned places become 3D objects, creating realistic yet virtual scenes. The digital glitches, distortions, and fragmentations that naturally occur during the scanning process resonate both with queer perspectives and the subjective nature of memory.

Artistic Team
The project is an international collaboration led by director Kristijonas Dirsė, alongside French sound artist and composer Alexandre Menexiadis, who is crafting the spatialized sound. Content, methodology, and sources for the project are developed in close dialogue with a dedicated network of LGBTQ+ researchers, activists, and artists. Crucial contributions, consultations, and creative insights are provided by researchers and activists Artūras Tereškinas, Viktorija Kolbešnikova and Augustas Čičelis, along with the “Išgirsti” association and the NGO “Meno Avilys”. The creative team also includes playwright Rimantas Ribačiauskas, composer and sound artist Andrius Šiurys and scenographer Karolina Klimavičiūtė.

Future Outlook
The initial presentation at the “Kreivės” festival marks the first step of a longer-term project. The team plans to tour the installation across queer and contemporary art festivals both in Lithuania and abroad. The next step is to expand this queer map by gathering more characters and narratives, expanding the creative team, with long-term plans to develop the project into a Virtual Reality (VR) experience and a location-based mobile application.

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