International youth group will perform at Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum

"Sound in the Silence" project

2022 October 3 d. 18:00

How can art help young people relive and understand some of the most difficult pages from the history of the last century? Students from Croatia, Hungary, Germany and Lithuania will visit the Ninth Fort of the Kaunas Fortress Museum to take part in the eighth edition of the educational project Sound in the Silence. The 19th-century fortress, which witnessed a Nazi crime during the Second World War, will become the site of interdisciplinary workshops for young people for more than a week. The result of their work will be the final performance, to take place at the Museum premises (Žemaičių pl. 73, Kaunas) on 3 October at 6 p.m. The project is delivered by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and the MOTTE association.

Built as part of the defensive fortifications on the western border of the Russian Empire, the Kaunas fortress came under the control of Nazi Germany in 1941. It was then transformed into a place of execution for some 50,000 prisoners, mostly of Jewish origin. The Ninth Fort’s uneasy and complex past will be the starting point for this year’s Sound in the Silence: an international project at the intersection of art, education and history. Its participants – students aged 14–18 – will come to Kaunas to take part in activities and workshops led by educators and artists within the walls of the historic fortress.

Direct contact with history will inspire young people and their teachers to become involved in artistic activities together: the young artists will turn their reflections and observations into a performance based on sound, word and movement. They will be assisted by the rapper and producer Dan Wolf (USA), the choreographer Katarina Rampackova (Slovakia), the performer Sean Palmer (UK), the psychologist Tetiana Krukovska (Ukraine) and educators from the Ninth Fort Museum. The result of their work will be on display on 3 October at 18:00 hrs at the Museum.  

The performance will be followed by a discussion with the artists, the educators leading the workshop and the young people involved on new methods in historical education.

Previous editions of the Sound in the Silence project took place in such cities as Gdańsk and Warsaw, as well as on the grounds of former concentration camps in Borne Sulinowo, Neuengamme near Hamburg and Ravensbrück.

The project funded by the European Union

More information on the project available at: https://enrs.eu/edition/sound-in-the-silence-2022-23

^{Promoters:  European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, MOTTE Association Hamburg, Germany
Partner:  Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum, Lithuania}