The Girl is Innocent, 1999, video, 17 min.

Education as an issue, in its broadest definition, is crucial to Arturas Raila's work. The "longer-term" effects of Soviet-era isolation, semi-literate discourse and submission to hierarchical structures has become a counterpoint in recent works. For almost a decade, Raila taught at the Vilnius Secondary School of Fine Arts. At Manifesta 3 he presents a video, The Girl is Innocent, which is footage of a teachers' conference held in the autumn of 1998. "This is the result of ten years' work. The same things were repeated all the time. This is just a detail from my daily life. And this film changes nothing. I changed my workplace, but you cannot change your homeland. I just chose another path and forgot about that period." The video releases anti-Western undercurrents usually withheld from public screenings, demonstrating rather than denouncing, but demonstrating well enough to unmask, and to warrant subsequent expulsion from this pedagogical collective. Arguably, the strategy in this work is articulation by the subject in the fluid there-and-then, rather than narration with an end in mind, a making-text of the event as such.