In 2020, during a residency at Nida Art Colony supported by the Neringa Municipality Art Grant, Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė conducted an artistic research project focused on the lives and labour of women in Neringa before and after Lithuanian independence. Through oral history interviews and meetings with local residents, she collected personal testimonies reflecting on work in the fishing, catering, and tourism industries, everyday life during the Soviet period, and the rapid social and economic transformations that followed the 1990s.
The research explored how large-scale political and economic changes become embedded in individual experiences, bodies, language, and memory. The conversations revealed complex relationships to the Soviet past, labour ethics, community, nostalgia, and loss, while also tracing the changing identity of Neringa through the expansion of tourism and shifting local economies.
The residency resulted in the publication Before I After: Histories of Women in Neringa, bringing together fragments of interviews, archival material, and reflections from the research process. The project later evolved into the performance What Remains — an imagined dialogue with a former workers’ canteen manager, combining documentary storytelling, archival references, and live performance. Through motifs of food, smell, labour, and domestic space, the work examines collective memory, post-Soviet transformation, and the lingering traces of industrial labour in contemporary Lithuania.
Imaginary archive 