The city of Vilnius rewards the curious traveller with odd juxtapositions. There’s a 15-foot-tall statue of Tony Soprano at the train station, clad in his dressing gown and looking permanently unimpressed. It’s a snapshot of Vilnius’s playful, post-Soviet embrace of global pop culture, an almost Dadaist gesture that feels entirely at home here. If you descend into a church crypt in the Old Town, you’ll find medieval frescoes, their faded faces peering through centuries of dust and candle smoke, saints barely clinging to the walls. In the old city centre, if you look up from the cobbled-stone roads, you might notice a 16th-century mural depicting glassblowers bending molten crystal into delicate vessels, the paint cracked but still warm with the glow of their imagined furnaces. At Draugų vardai, a small club hidden behind a nondescript courtyard, artists gather and dance to heady mixes of ambient electronica laced with baroque-inspired samples. In the Neringa restaurant, a Soviet-era mural stretches along the restaurant wall as guests dine on cold beetroot soup, herring, and Russian egg salad, followed by Champagne jelly for dessert. The mural depicts elegant renderings of factory workers and machinery in idealised hues, communist optimism immortalised in paint. Walking between these sites, you sense the dialogue between survival and memory, just as in Ferma, a new film and installation by Lithuanian author and artist Gabija Grušaitė, where objects, film, and narration coalesce to make tangible the psychological landscape of a frontier.

Hoarding is usually treated as a pathology; a psychological compulsion marked by an inability to discard objects and an excessive attachment to possessions that results in cluttered homes and minds. But, in areas shaped by political instability, hoarding can also serve as a coping mechanism, a form of protection, or a material buffer against systemic precarity. Studies have shown that individuals may accumulate material objects in response to real or perceived threats of deprivation, drawing upon anxieties around scarcity, displacement, or abandonment. Whether under empire, socialism, or capitalism, a persistent logic remains: keep everything close, because at any moment, it might all be taken away.

This is the logic central to Ferma. It was curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and staged in Gabija’s father Marius Grušas’s vast, dust-laden warehouse in the village of Sariai, near Vilnius, once a collectivised agricultural settlement near the Belarusian border. The proximity to the border carries weight. Grušas is a sculptor whose works once shaped Lithuania’s Soviet-era urban fabric, with monumental reliefs, commemorative statues and public art commissions displayed in Vilnius. He bought the former dairy complex in Sariai in the 1990s, just as the collective farm system collapsed with the Soviet Union. What had been a locus of coerced production became a studio and an archive for his collected belongings, and over decades, he filled it compulsively with marble torsos, rusted machinery, pigments, slabs of engraved stone, books, nails and even petrified fruit.

Objects in Marius Grušas’s warehouse in the village of Sariai. Grušas is renowned for his Medeinė statue, which depicts the namesake Lithuanian goddess of hunting riding a bear, one of the many animal-based statues dotted around Vilnius.

Walking through the warehouse, it feels less like a studio than a pathway of the subconscious, with aisles of objects – some practical, some absurd – all piled and arranged into a material psyche that traces fear, invention and imagination.

Stepping into the entrance of the installation, visitors walk over a concrete floor with a chalk-drawn map of the surrounding countryside, depicting woods, lakes, milk routes, a sawmill, and a Soviet school in ruins. The map is intended to fade. “Erasing it was a ritual of letting go,” Grušaitė told me, while we were speaking in a hotel lobby in Vilnius old town. The map operated as a counterpoint to her father’s impulsive need to hoard. The exhibition guides visitors into the warehouse, where the rhythmic clicks of machinery reverberate methodically throughout the space. At the far end, a monumental two-channel screen plays Ferma, a film that documents the warehouse itself, with slow-moving close ups of various hoarded objects, the surrounding village, and some of Grušas’s sculptures, accompanied by Grušaitė’s narration: “Only as the war of my generation draws closer and the sound of drones enters the nightmares can I finally understand what it means to come from the frontier… It is not safe here. But we still grow.” At first viewing, the work could seem like a sentimental familial film, but Grušaitė – a novelist whose fiction books (Cold East (2018), and The Mycelium Dream (2023)) has long explored post-Soviet feeling – resists nostalgia. Rather than idealising a lost past, she lingers in the uneasy present, tracing how personal and collective memory continue to unsettle any stable sense of identity or place.

The title Ferma carries multiple layers of meaning, too. In Lithuanian, ferma (borrowed from Russian ферма) specifically refers to a farm, and often evokes Soviet-style agricultural structures. In Italian, ferma has a different Proto-Indo-European root and meaning, suggesting a stillness, preservation, or suspension in time. The act of keeping, in this sense, may reflect a refusal to let go of histories made precarious by colonialism, migration, or state erasure. Anthropologists studying patrimony and heritage have shown how objects, archives, and everyday possessions are not merely inert materials but carriers of identity, memory and loss. “I always hated this place,” Grušaitė continues in Ferma’s narration. “Large and cold, filled with layers of history that my father refuses to let go. However, now, I can finally see the value of creating art in a site of trauma; an archive of both objects and memories.” Her return to this space is a recognition that the architecture of that period lingers long after the state has changed its alliances. For her, the frontier is a psychological state. “It is a deep uncertainty within the psyche, a constant awareness that decisions are made in unstable conditions,” she explains. That instability, she continues, breeds a certain resilience. Through research into epigenetics, she has become fascinated by how trauma is transgenerational, affecting both the mind and body, though Grušaitė has become interested in the biological element, and tells me that “responses activated by trauma can be passed down for at least three generations.” In a region marked by repeated occupations, abrupt ideological shifts, and fragile independence still shadowed by Russian aggression, what does it mean to inherit instability?

Hoarding might be pathological but here it becomes a metaphor for a nation that has survived conflict and trauma, and for the next generation that continues to learn how to let go. The father’s instinct to preserve clashes with the daughter’s impulse to seek resolve. The curators looked to art history, specifically at the international Fluxus movement from the 1960s, co-founded by Lithuanian-American George Mačiūnas and championed by Jonas Mekas, which insisted that art could belong to anyone and anywhere. “We always saw Fluxus as a movement that wanted to bring art outside the institution,” says curator Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. Ferma is a nod to that lineage whilst situating it in a site heavy with personal and political charge. Lithuania today is a difficult place, and it is clear that trauma is not far from the surface. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has reawakened fear that the empire might return. In that context, does Ferma perform a certain catharsis, or underline the impossibility of letting go?

Soviet-era murals in Neringa restaurant in Vilnius. Neringa is one of the most famous restaurants in Lithuania; its interior has remained unchanged since it opened in 1959.

The warehouse feels less like a studio than a pathway of the subconscious

Danylo Halkin’s stained glass work “Optical Prostheses” (2022-2025), part of an exhibition at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.

My grandmother was born in 1930 in southern Italy, as Europe slid toward catastrophe with the onset of the Second World War. She kept everything, from ribbons, buttons, biscuit tins full of more biscuit tins, seemingly unnecessary objects stored in containers that were stored in other containers, like a matryoshka (Russian doll) of memory. My grandfather used to buy tins and tins of food in a small, private insurance against hunger. He had grown up with so little, on a working farm in rural Ireland, where the cupboards were never quite full and where waste was an unforgivable sin. Growing up, he joked with us about having to scrap for food with the dogs. A committed socialist and pacifist, he migrated to the United Kingdom in his late twenties, carrying with him that deep pragmatism and a moral conviction that the world could be fairer if only people cared enough. His shelves stored towers of canned beans, soup, peaches in syrup, tins of tomatoes arranged like quiet sentinels against an old fear. It’s strange, thinking about how these habits of keeping, these quiet rituals of preservation echo in our own generation’s anxieties. I think about trauma now, not just as a personal inheritance but as a global one, the grief of displacement in Ukraine and Gaza, in so many places where people hoard hope because that’s all they can keep.

Walking through the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, the museum’s private collection reflects its nation-building agenda: its permanent collection charts a proud arc of Lithuanian modernism emerging, surviving occupation, and flourishing after independence. Vilnius’s multicultural past is present, but often in the background, where minority voices are acknowledged as contributors to Lithuanian culture rather than as autonomous, sometimes competing identities. Like many national museums, it offers coherence where history is messy, creating a unifying cultural story at the cost of complexity, a careful choreography of pride and omission that says as much about the present as it does about the past. Amongst this complexity, Ferma insists on the present-tense weight of history, questioning whether trauma can never truly be neutralised, or if every attempt simply changes its form. .