Balloons forget the sky, 2026, HD video, 04:18, 16:9, stereo

Balloons Forget the Sky examines the appearance of meteorological balloons carrying contraband in the night sky as a form of hybrid warfare, where an ambiguous and difficult-to-identify threat enters everyday life and transforms the familiar Lithuanian landscape into a zone of political tension. Drawing on AI, personal archives, and photographs found online, the video follows the balloons over snow-covered fields, forests, cities, and industrial areas, tracing how their presence disrupts air traffic and ordinary movement while turning the sky itself into a contested political space. The balloons carry an unknown cargo—simultaneously potential, promise, threat, and mystery—and their trajectory becomes a slow nocturnal investigation in which reality and fiction, information and speculation, are deliberately entangled; by morning, the same objects lie deflated and torn open, their political charge seemingly reduced to plastic waste scattered across the landscape.