HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Aleksandra Kasuba, Child Ticking. A Memoir (Tiksintis vaikas. Atsiminimai), Vilnius: Lithuanian National Museum of Art, 2023, 110 pp.

Aleksandra Kasuba wrote this book at the age of seventy-seven. It is a memoir of the first nine years of her life (1923–1932), roaming over the landscape of her early years, enveloped in a bright and hopeful veil of nostalgia and love. Beneath this veil lies the environment of Kasuba’s native Ginkūnai country estate and everyday life during the first independent Republic of Lithuania (1918–1940), relationships among members of the landlord family and their family stories, adventures in discovering the world and her earliest self-reflections. Describing her life in both everyday and festive moments, brimming with adventures and playful moments, Kasuba weaves a story of how, living in three different worlds (at home, at school, and in the garden or fields), a ticking child is growing up who is experiencing the surrounding environment and its phenomena as if squared and for whom imagination serves as a refuge from the real world. Recounting stories about her parents and the visitors to the estate – people of strong convictions, independent and tolerant – Kasuba recreates the stances and attitudes of the landed gentry in interwar Lithuania, attesting that social status is not about boasting about one’s privileges, but rather about the binding obligation to fulfil one’s duties. Kasuba’s childhood memories, evoking Edenic imagery, reaffirm that the greatest gift parents can give their children is trusting them, not rushing them to grow up, and giving them permission to encounter their feelings and, indeed, life, for themselves.

Lithuanian-American environmental artist, sculptor and architect, Aleksandra Fledžinskaitė-Kašubienė (Kasuba) (1923–2019), was born on the Ginkūnai country estate and spent her first years of life in free and independent interwar Lithuania and studied at art schools in Kaunas and Vilnius in 1942–1943. In 1944, she fled to Germany but, in 1947, she settled in New York before moving to New Mexico in 2001. During her 77 years of creative practice, she produced numerous artworks in a wide range of mediums: textile, painting, watercolour, ceramic tile panels, mosaics, and relief walls. Kasuba is most renowned for her tensile fabric structure installations, the so-called spatial environments, such as stretch-fabric shelters.

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