In the seventh micro-exhibition from Building Narratives series, we present the project by Povilas Vincentas Jankūnas – an imaginative board game Districts of Fantasy and audio-visual narrative Red Clouds developed during the game session in Eiguliai district, Kaunas. 

Author of the game Districts of Fantasy Povilas Vincentas Jankūnas is an architect, creator of comics and interactive media. Povilas created the game when participating in Architektūros fondas programme Building Narratives, which explored the relations between architecture and narratives. While playing this universal board game, participants create new narratives or myths about a real or fictional place using its map, questions of the game, cards or dice and, most importantly, imagination. On the turns, players narrate and draw their answers to the questions on the map, creating a new narrative of the location, intertwined and connected by an unexpectedly emerging thread of a collective script.  In this way, ordinary locations, lacking historical or cultural strata, can be diversified through countless imaginary narratives, while areas of particular interest can become rich backgrounds for many imaginary tales. Red Clouds narrative was created after a Districts of Fantasy game session last year. The game was conducted on a map of post-soviet mass housing residential district Eiguliai in Kaunas.

The role of narratives and imagination  is central in the game. According to Povilas, “narrative is a great power that shapes and changes our attitude and understanding of architecture and cities. We create stories and live them every day. Stories activate our imagination and reveal the environment of our lives in unusual ways, therefore we delve into history, read books, listen to stories that bring us to completely different past, present or imaginary worlds. As we read or listen to the story, we can imagine the places even more alive and complex than in present reality. Combination of this phenomenon and architecture creates tremendous power, which produces engaging and flowing narratives about spaces and places where something special, unusual and unreal is about to happen. And the longer these stories stay in our minds, the stronger we tend believing them.”

We invite you to explore audio-visual narrative Red Clouds in the cultural centre SODAS 2123 (until the 26th of September) and in the virtual, compiled reality with the live comments by Povilas, and his earlier and later works combining media of graphic design, comics, video and board games.

About Building Narratives

In the micro-exhibition series, we present works developed within Architektūros fondas programme Building Narratives in 2019–2020. Creatives of the  Building Narratives programme explored the relations between architecture and narrative, when buildings aren’t shaped by mortar and concrete anymore – crucial and sometimes the most important ingredient is narrative. Whether it is purely a PR product or an organic construct it creates perceptions and shapes the way we see and understand our environment. Hearing, reading or assembling a narrative from smaller pieces helps us to determine if something is good, useful and even beautiful. At the same time, changing narrative has the power to change perceptions of our environment. Bad can become good, ugly-beautiful, all without any changes in physical structure.

As a new narrative has the power to transform architecture on its own, it becomes extremely important to understand how different ways of talking about architecture can shape its future. Therefore Architektūros fondas was seeking to discover personal narratives and encourage the creatives to get involved in this affair. Programme merged the ongoing projects of Architektūros fondas and their methods, while looking for common ground among podcasts and publications platform Aikštėje and Future Architecture platform creatives.

Creatives of the Future Architecture platform within the Building Narratives programme: Goda Verikaitė, Povilas Jankūnas, Sonja Lakič, Tatiana Letier Pinto, Un-War Space Lab, Will Jennings. Curators of programme: Andrius Ropolas, Indrė Ruseckaitė, Justinas Dūdėnas, Sandra Šlepikaitė. Curators of micro exhibitions: Indrė Ruseckaitė ir Justinas Dūdėnas

Building Naratives is also a part of the Future Architecture platform and European Architecture programme 2020, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Architektūros fondas' strategic partner is Lithuanian Council for Culture. Partner – Kaunas 2022 programmes Modernism for Future and All as One.