The Soldier’s diary. A record of erased time

ENThe Soldier's Diary was a response to a famous criminal case: on 1 February 1987, on a train carrying prisoners to Leningrad, a Lithuanian soldier, Arturas Sakalauskas, shot eight of his 'comrades-in-arms'. The Soldier's Diary is an ironic imitation of a 'proper' military album. The danger of making an illegal artefact, the fake camaraderie and patriotism, naïve roughness, innocence, simplicity and the rawness of Art Brut were part of Gintaras Zinkevicius' performance. Yet the 'ingredients' were mixed in such a way as to reveal something that remains invisible in traditional albums. Against the background, the errors and greyness of 'amateur' photographs in The Soldier's Album worked as a piece of reality which was presented without comment - a version of indirect speech characteristic of the Soviet art of resistance. Since The Soldier's Diary has been published, the album serves yet another subversive purpose: to reinstate knowledge of a time that is quickly eroding from collective memory.