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In his first film, Europa 54[degrees]54'-25[degrees]19', 1997, Deimantas Narkevicius sets out for the center of Europe--which, after a reestimation of the borders of the continent by geographers at the Parisian Institut Geographique National in 1989, is located at a spot in a village called Purnuskes, north of Vilnius ("One Friday morning I got the urge to go and see the center of Europe"). The artist can be heard offscreen explaining that he had previously disregarded the existence of this supposedly highly significant location in Lithuania, dismissing it as just another instance of the sort of ethnocentric ideology typical of new countries, but that he now considers this geographical datum the central point of reference governing...
