The resonance of abandonment: visiting, photographing, and filming the Vilnius Sports Palace

The Sporto rūmai, the Vilnius Sports Palace, is an indoor arena in Vilnius, Lithuania built in 1971 and a remarkable example of brutalist architecture. The arena was closed in 2008 for safety reasons. Plans to renovate the building have so far failed leaving the site as a modern ruin. In my visual art practice, I engage with modern urban space, looking for and exploring sites that resonate with collective memory and utopian promise. I use, and experiment with, audiovisual documentation of these sites. Cities and architecture are experienced perceptually – how we see and hear and how we move through them. My attraction for the Vilnius Sports Palace stems from what I see as its resonant qualities. It demands our attention, but we are not sure why. This resonance is expressed by the site’s own vulnerability as a tragic ruin or an abandoned opportunity for community participation. It also resonates through the visitor who might be sensitive to the Palace’s architectural and social potential seemingly rendered obsolete. The uncanny familiarity of the structure leaves the visitor uncertain in what they might consider meaningful in their experience of the site. This essay reflects on a photo and video exploration during which I captured and recorded digitally the site of the Palace. These files are inscriptions of the visual, aural and temporal presence of the site at two moments in time (in 2012 and 2023). They capture moments of the changing site in the recent past that will resonate into the future. Cover image: “Sporto rūmai, the Vilnius Sports Palace"