at Performance Art Weekend, Kaunas 2025
What Remains is a performance by Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė developed as an imagined dialogue with a former workers’ canteen manager. Presented in the historic Kaunas cafeteria Prie soboro, the work reflects on industrial labour, post-Soviet memory, nostalgia, and the contradictions embedded within personal recollection. Combining archival storytelling and live performance, the piece examines how political and economic transformations continue to inhabit everyday language, bodies, smells, and spaces.
Former factory canteens remain today as silent monuments to industrial labour and Soviet occupation. Through intimate narration and sensory imagery, the performance opens a multilayered reflection on memory, identity, and transformation.
“I sit in a room saturated with memory and smells, listening to stories filled with pride and contradiction — about food, labour, loss, and endurance.
‘It never smelled,’ she says.
‘We always had the best products…’
We sit in a dark room full of absorbed smells. I eat thick, dark red beet soup she warmed up for me. I nod my head as if agreeing with everything she says.
Can it be true that a meat factory processing raw meat never had a smell? Is she lying? I am surprised by her certainty. She does not even blink.
I wonder who she votes for now. She is not ashamed to say what is wrong with the world today and how proud she is of the past. She would be disappointed in me, just as she is disappointed in the world today.
I do not want to argue. I only want to understand.”
The performance was part of the Kaunas Artists’ House Performance Art Weekend.
Programme curator: Edvinas Grinkevičius.
Supported by: Kaunas City Municipality.
Partners: Kaunas pilnas kultūros, Kaunas Chamber Theatre, Kaunas County Vincas Kudirka Public Library, Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum, SODAS 2123, and Kultūra Café.
Imaginary archive 