Transcriber: Josephine Wilson Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
What is art?
A question I get asked very often and struggle to answer every time.
I see myself as an interventionist,
even though I'm labelled as a street artist very often.
What I seek in my art is not the image which I deliver with my work,
it's the reaction from the people
and connection with the viewer which I expect.
What I do is inspired my experience, my everyday life, my observations,
my observations of my environment, of the communities I'm in,
the people that I meet, the architecture that I see,
it all reflects in my work.
And with my work, I expect the viewer to question these things,
question my observations and our environment.
My aim is to take people out of their everyday experiences
and spark a creative thought, spark a curiousity,
spark an emotion within themselves,
which would deliver some sort of response in their own creative ways.
Some of you might know me for the piece that I did a couple of years ago
here in Lithuania, where I'm from, on a cinema called 'Lithuania'.
And this piece has provoked quite a controversial reaction
due to the reaction of a local graffiti community,
which made the piece look more like this very soon after it's been painted.
I get a lot of questions ask: How do I feel about it, was I offended?
And what's my response to the actions of the local artists.
And the thing is, I've been overwhelmed at this.
This reaction was something which I seek in my work,
the creative response, the having seen people react to my work
and take their action in response to it
have delivered a great conversation about the street art, about public art,
what is art and what is graffiti,
and what should be legal, and should not in the public space.
However, to explain more where I'm coming from,
I probably would have to rewind a little bit
a couple of years before I started working so extensively in the street.
I'm very passionate about travel, I visit a lot of places. I travel a lot.
And one of the regions I'm very much interested in is Southeast Asia.
I travelled there first in 2008, starting with the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.
With a first expectation to find this tropical paradise,
the island of adventure and wonder,
I end up in a place which is extremely overpopulated,
malnourished by poverty and corruption.
And that was very shocking to me to find out.
However, the surprising thing was
that I found communities were extremely welcoming, and friendly, and open-minded.
And connecting with these communities,
I end up having hundreds and hundreds of portraits
which I took with my camera and carried away throughout my trip,
until I got settled down in Penang Island in Malaysia.
While living in Malaysia since 2010,
I've been creating these street interventions,
bringing out my experience which I gathered throughout my travels,
the people which I met and which left a deep [impression] on me.
I wanted to express my connection with them in the public space
in the hope that somehow that would be communicated to the viewer,
and make the emotional impact which I really seek in my work.
One of the more recognised pieces was this piece in Penang
of children on bicycle,
which was a result of my thoughts about how locals see the environment,
how locals see their community,
and what they see in the streets, and the charm of a town that they live in.
I found that a lot of people travel in their cars
from one shopping mall to another
without really being aware of what's going on right in front of them
and seeing the beauty and the charm of the places that we live in.
I thought if I would put this piece with a bicycle in it,
it might encourage a person or two to come out of that street,
and walk around it actually, or cycle around it to see the beauty of it.
And very soon after, I got a response from locals,
of people flooding in groups to take pictures with the artwork,
to cycle there and walk around and explore.
More and more artwork started popping up in that area.
More creative people started reaching out to me
saying how inspired they were to do something in the public space,
do something oudoor where people see it,
and people could travel with the bicycles and explore the wonders of the city.
Years later, the piece is still there.
And now the car traffic has been replaced with bicycle traffic.
And this is an example of the breaking point
in my creative career, in my work,
where I understood how powerful the artwork can be.
Not the image, not the picture that we create,
but the emotional connection of the art, the emotional connection that you put in,
the thought that you put in in your art,
how that connects to the people and how people respond to it.
I understood the power of it, and the effect,
and that my actions can somehow provoke other people's actions.
And living more in the region
and learning more about the communities and the environment,
you experience this phenomenon, as people call it, transboundary haze.
A sad thing, rather inconvenient.
The sky gets cloudy a couple of months a year,
bringing the haze from Indonesia, which travels across the borders
to Singapore, to Malaysia, to Thailand,
clouding the sky for three or four months a year.
It becomes an everyday experience for people,
people just carry on their lives, it's slightly inconvenient sometimes.
Sometimes it's more, but people live with it.
So did I.
And that affected my work a lot, that affected my thoughts a lot,
and what my experience is.
Every decade or so, the levels of pollution reach a critical level,
and Singapore gets paralysed, so does Malaysia.
The airports get shut down, the schools get closed down,
the hospitals are overwhelmed with people with lung diseases.
And in 2015, we had a tragically hot year with extremely prolonged hot season,
and that resulted in rather catastrophic results
that put the issue on the global media.
There were reports of up to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the region,
especially striking a lot the core regions in Malaysia and Indonesia.
And hearing all that about Indonesia,
about the region which really inspired and affected me a lot,
especially the Sumatra island,
has inspired me to channel my creative energy,
channel my thoughts and channel my work to the cause.
And I came up with a project, 'Splash and Burn',
which I name in response of a slash and burn activity,
which is a way of agriculture and preparation of land by burning the land,
which is a major reason of the haze which we get in the region.
For you to better understand what I'm talking about,
this is a map of part of Indonesia, the part that I'm talking about.
I was staying in Malaysia, at the top of the map,
just under the island of Sumatra and the neighbouring island of Borneo.
For you to better understand the proportion of it,
it's not the tiny tropical island which we might imagine,
these are huge territories, and Borneo island is actually bigger than France.
So having that region set on fire has a massive impact on an entire region.
So I started researching more about what are the reasons and major causes
of the effect which we're getting every year.
And I found out that the palm oil industry has a lot to do with that.
So as I started my research, I tried to find the maps,
tried to find the data, the information where it's all coming from,
and I just get more and more confused.
This is a map of palm oil plantations which I could find online,
according to the governments of Malaysia and Singapore.
Researching more, I found out that agricultural land in Indonesia
looks more like this, which looks relatively big
[in proportion to] the protected forest areas which we have left in the islands.
This is a very new industry.
The palm oil industry has been there for the last 30 years.
It has started to grow extensively for the last 30 years.
And it's the fastest growing commodity in the world at the moment.
As researching these maps, I would get more and more confused,
reading more and more media,
I had controversial information just flooding my mind.
I could not understand what it is about,
and I decided this is the time when I have to go back to Sumatra
and see it for myself once again, the subject that I'm talking about.
The moment you fly into Sumatra, you see fields and fields
of palm oil plantations.
And it's very rare that you see
any bit of forest or cities in the area.
The moment I landed, I connected with a number of people
working in environmental organisations, activists, NGOS.
And I had meetings with them, just talking, having conversations,
and discussing the issues, the problems that affect them
as the community in Sumatra.
The moment you step into the first office and you see an oxygen mask
in the corner of a room waiting for the burning season,
you understand the severity of the situation,
and how affected people are, and how they are forced to just pass their lives
and live with the cause.
However, once again, connecting to these people there,
you find the most inspiring individuals, the most inspiring communities,
who do so much work to protect and fight for it.
And their response to my visit and to my ideas was really overwhelming.
How they saw this as opportunity to talk about what they care [about],
to connect with the outside,
because they are really very much isolated from the world.
Even though Europe is the second biggest market for the palm oil industry,
very little of us know about the effects of it that we are causing
by little actions we do every day,
by eating that potato chip or brushing our teeth.
The product is in everything. Palm oil product is in everything.
Our paper is made from acacia trees grown in the region.
And rarely do we think about our connection to the community globally.
We see our neighbours, but we rarely think about our ripple effect of our actions
to the global community and the global environment.
Inspired by that, there was only one thing for me to do.
I did the thing which I knew the best and I started making art.
I started painting the paintings inspired by my experience there
and what I learned, inspired by all these conversations,
and all this information which I gathered there.
I stayed in Sumatra and started working on the series of paintings.
Throughout that process, I reached out to a number of artists overseas,
asking them if they would be willing to contribute to the cause somehow.
And I had incredible response once again from creatives all over the world.
And people started flooding to Sumatra;
I had more than 10 artists joining me on this project,
to create their art and communicate their passion for the communities
and the environment in the area to their audience.
This is a piece by Italian artist, Pixel Pancho,
where he depicted orangutans,
one of the endangered species common in the area, as robots.
And he placed them in public spaces, in parks,
to communicate and remind people
how close we are to losing these fascinating creatures.
So did the artist StrØk from Norway.
He travelled all the way to Bukit Lawang village,
which is a bordering village of massive fields of palm oil plantations
with a national park.
And he did this piece on a billboard
which used to be a gateway to the national park,
now it's just a rusty old billboard in front of the palm oil plantation office.
A number of artists such as Bibichun from Malaysia,
Gabriel Pitcher from the UK,
Axel Void from the US came out all the way from the US
and spent weeks living in the tiny little houses with workers of plantation,
exploring the everyday life of the communities
who have no other environment but the plantations itself,
the lives of children who have never seen anything else but palm oil fields.
He stayed with communities, interacted with them,
talked about the issues that they find important,
and the response from the locals was overwhelming,
the welcome we got from people,
and seeing how eager they were to communicate their issues,
their everyday lives, their everyday habits.
They wanted to be connected to the people outside.
They knew the product that they work on, the job that they do,
is for someone far, far out there in Europe,
but they have no way to communicate that.
And seeing these people coming there and actually showing their interest,
showing that they care was very inspiring to them as well, as it was to us.
Artist Isaac Cordal from Spain, artist Mark Jenkins,
both of them have explored the impact of the industries
and of the global market to the environment,
and how deserted the environment is,
and the result of these agricultural processes.
They placed their installations far out, even though they're street artists
who always work in the communities and the public space,
they placed their installations far out in the fields
to never be seen by the public eye just to highlight the issue,
how little do we know
and how much information do we get of the situation out there,
which is very much dependent on our everyday actions.
Having such an overwhelming response, our core idea was communicate the issue,
raise up a dialogue, bring the issue back to the global media, to the global eye
outside of burning season, not waiting for the disaster to happen,
but start starting the conversation way prior.
It's very little time that we have left to protect and to save
whatever we have to treasure out there in the region.
And we have to see ourselves as a global community.
We have to see ourselves as citizens.
We launched this project through The Guardian newspaper,
which later caused a great response from many different media outlets.
From the BBC, we had support from the Leonardo di Caprio Foundation,
spreading the word and spreading the message about it.
And once again, I understood what art is to me.
The art of communication, the art of bringing dialogue,
the art which connects people, the art which delivers the message
and raises the dialogues for us to be more conscious about what we do,
to be more conscious about the consequences of our actions,
to be more aware of our environments,
not just immediate environments in our communities,
but a global environment as such.
And this brings me back to everything that I love about art.
This is one of the pieces I did
in collaboration with a local graffiti artist, Smane, from Medan, Sumatra,
which I want to leave you with.
Which brings me back to my passion, to everything what I do.
I want you all to see the art which is beyond the image,
to see the art which is beyond what we see.
I want you to feel the art, to get the effect of it, get inspired,
and express things that inspire you in your own creative way.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)