The opening of the documentary photography exhibition “Lithuanians of Argentina: Departures and Returns” will take place on 16 May 2025 (Friday) at 5:00 PM at The Valdas Adamkus Presidential Library-Museum (S. Daukantas St. 25, Kaunas). The exhibition is a joint creative project of photographer Mykolas Juodelė and Argentinian Lithuanian Sandra Rivero, exploring the history and present of the Lithuanian diaspora in Argentina. The exhibition will run from 16 May to 20 June, during which time the exhibition will be accompanied by lectures, excursions and meetings with the artists.
Between the wars, more than 30 000 Lithuanians emigrated to Argentina to escape poverty and political instability. Among them were Sandra Rivero’s great-grandparents Povilas Lipnickas and Adelė Baršauskaitė, who left Daujėnai in 1925 for Buenos Aires. Sandra learned about her Lithuanian roots when she was a teenager, and a long search for her family history eventually led her to the same church in Daujėnai where her great-grandparents were married almost a century ago.
The exhibition “Lithuanians of Argentina: Departures and Returns” is a documentary photographic narrative in three parts. The first part tells the story of the Szlapeliai (Šlapeliai) family from Kupiškės, who founded the town of Sarmiento in Patagonia at the end of the 19th century. This part is complemented by never-before-published images and diary extracts of the first photographer of Sarmiento, José Szlapel (Juozas Szlapelis). The second part reveals the stories of the Lithuanian-Argentine communities in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Beris and Esquel, as well as the return to Lithuania of the younger generation of Argentine Lithuanians. The third part is a photo essay about Sandra Rivero’s journey to her ancestral villages in the Pasvalys district, in search of traces of her great-grandparents’ lives.
During their ten-month-long travels in Argentina and Lithuania, the authors collected archival material, interviewed dozens of Argentine Lithuanians, and visited Argentine Lithuanian communities from Buenos Aires to Esquel and from Rosario to Sarmiento. The series of photographs is complemented by archival photographs, fragments of diaries and letters of the emigrants, while the text inserts convey both historical contexts and personal narratives.
The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and the Lithuanian Copyright Association LATGA.
