About the project
How and why project started?
The project that explores Lithuanian canteens was started by the graphic designer Indrė Klimaitė, at the moment living in the Hague. She received her BA in Design in Vilnius Academy of Arts, and MA in Type and Media in The Royal Academy of Arts (The Hague).
Indrė liked canteens all her life. When she noticed the canteens were closing one by one, this artist decided to try to stop it.
In collaboration with historians, writers and a photographer, Indrė traces histories and contemporary operation of Vilnius' canteens, researching them as places of current social relations. The aim of the project is to expose and revive dying, neglected and controversial canteen subculture in a modern outfit, to increase public acceptance, awareness and appreciation of past tradition, and present it as a cultural value of Lithuania in these days. The research becomes a product itself, so it could inspire for new ideas in fashion, product design and life style areas.
What was done to serve you our compote?
It is a great challenge to collect some kind of database of all the canteens. If you start searching for the canteens on the Internet or in catalogues, you will find only 5 of them. So the project team were asking their friends, taxi drivers to give information about the canteens. At first the canteen reconnaissance was conducted, and its purpose was to collect contacts, introduce themselves, plan future meetings, interviews and photo sessions with the staff. When the photographer Isabel had arrived in Lithuania, around 15 canteens were visited per week. In every canteen the team used to spend at least 2 hours while taking photos, tasting food and talking to the staff. Every canteen is 200 photos, one or even several main course dishes, and at least a half of an hour socializing with workers.
During the project we drank more than 110 glasses of compote which is more than 2 buckets of this sweet and refreshing drink. If we put together all the work experience of the cooks who were working in the canteens, we would get more than 300 years in total. A total record of the project is the day when we visited 7 canteens. One and the same person was not only drinking compote in each canteen, but also eating main course dishes. During the project the team didn't use more than half a pack of digestive pills. Also no one put any additional kilos while eating non-stop in the canteens for two weeks.