For this interview, I spoke not only with a metalhead but also with a musician, an academic, a performance and video artist, a sound designer, a curator, and a screenwriter. All of these roles are embraced by Daina Pupkevičiūtė, also known as Daina Dieva, whose interests entwine the realms of human and non-human existence, perhaps even the entire globe.
(This text was published in the April 2026 issue of ‘Kaunas Full of Culture’, titled ‘Metal’)
Metal was Daina’s teenage passion, and the bonds formed through it are strong yet flexible: adaptable and stretching across space and time. Daina also mentioned that she still occasionally plays songs by the metal band Emperor on her guitar.
You mentioned that industrial music entered your life when you grew tired of listening to metal. How long was metal the most-listened-to genre in your daily life?
I first heard the riffs of darker music when I was 16 or 17. Compared to my friends, this happened quite late; for example, Gediminas Šečkus-Audronašas, the creator of the radio show Audronaša, which has been running since 2007, seems to have been listening to metal since he was in the cradle.
Initially, metal was not a major part of my horizon, but as my circle of friends expanded, so did the variety of music. The friends I listened to metal with in Kaunas often played it themselves and were very knowledgeable, so there was an intense exchange. I immersed myself in this experience because it was a great group of people: true metal nerds. Interesting conversations and discoveries followed; the Giljotina forum was founded, and we organised concerts and festivals. These were the results of great passion and commitment.
How did your focus shift from metal to the field of experimental and industrial music?
I was mostly interested in death and brutal death metal; some bands remain relevant to this day. When I worked on the radio show Audronaša, I became more interested in black metal, but I was always searching for a more complex sound and a more diverse approach to the genre. That was when I discovered many experimental and strange sounds. Political matters also became relevant: the values and conceptual guidelines that shape the creation of sounds, and what musicians communicate both on and off the stage. I found a dialogue aligned with my own values more frequently in the grind, metalcore, and hardcore genres.
I understand that metal has not remained just teenage nostalgia and is still relevant. What influence do you feel it has on your current creative work?
Indeed, it was not just a phase. I cannot keep up with everything in the Lithuanian scene, but what is happening still matters to me. I also see problems; for instance, the number of venues for interesting music in Kaunas, not just for metal, has not increased since my adolescence; it may even have decreased.
Metal remained in my life because I met many of my friends through it. I gained a lot of organisational skills working specifically in the metal music scene, such as for the Devilstone festival. I even started playing the guitar with the help of metalhead friends, and sometimes when I compose riffs, they carry part of that metal legacy. Occasionally, I warm up by playing tracks by Emperor.
There were tensions in my relationship with the scene because, as a feminist, I always felt there were too few women. I could not believe how much misogyny existed in the lyrics, behaviour, and on stage; it made me angry and hurt. I was part of that community simply to be there as a woman and perhaps change something through my presence. I encountered many sexists in the industrial music scene too, so these issues are not confined to one genre but are a broader cultural problem. Many structural factors make musical spaces inaccessible: not only to women but also to non-binary or other individuals. A large part of my organisational work, especially in developing the industrial culture platform Matters, focused on how to create a space for diverse people, how to attract them, and how to ensure continuity so that the space remains open.
Whilst we are talking about music, another connecting theme is emerging: relationships. They have long been within your field of interest; your dissertation, which you defended at the University of Tartu this February, is also related to them (congratulations!). Tell us more about your four-year doctoral research.
I view everything as an entanglement of things. I conducted my research in a small valley in France where a disaster, a major storm, occurred in October 2020. I went there to understand how people create connections with the landscape and what such a territory can reveal about the climate crisis. Upon arrival, it became clear that the ability to comprehend what happened, to see one catastrophe as part of the climate crisis, depends heavily on the type of connection people have with the landscape: whether it is a tourist connection or something deeper.
A deeper relationship in this specific case involves the realisation that we co-create the landscape alongside various beings, and that interspecies existence is the foundation of life’s continuity. We must take responsibility for how we, as humans, live, and realise that our existence depends on multifaceted co-existence and cooperation: an interspecies relationship and connection stretching across generations. I call this ‘interspecies intergenerational generativity’ and study it anthropologically by looking beyond just human relationships. It is difficult to give a voice to the non-human other through anthropological methods, so in my doctoral research, I used my art practice to weave abiotic vector relationships into the equation, and to speak about how fog or refugee stories can reveal climate change.
In this case, you studied the climate crisis and its manifestations in a defined territory, but you used various approaches and a complex gaze. How do you view this research object?
According to Timothy Morton, the climate crisis is a hyperobject: a combination of countless different things. These things interact in various ways and are difficult for the human mind to grasp because they are scattered not only across the globe but also across time. When a problem is this complex, I believe it is best approached through interdisciplinary methods, as all components are linked by very different connections. To discuss individual aspects of these problems, one needs very different approaches. Thus, being an artist and an anthropologist with an interest in, say, botany or invasive species, helps immensely.
The topic seems like a tangle of your various interests.
On one hand, I entered the field with a broad range of interests, but the field itself demanded exactly that. My focus on the climate crisis has influenced the sounds I create and the problems I explore. In recent years, I have been working on a project about how war affects ecosystems; I am thinking about ecocide in Ukraine. I find my methods and disciplines useful because I also see war as a hyperobject. With the help of scientists working in ecology and ecotoxicology, I am trying to understand what war means for multi-species relationships and what remains afterwards (or what no longer remains and will never exist again), then I think about how to communicate this through visual forms.
You spoke about the problem areas you encountered in music scenes and chose to examine in your academic and artistic research. These are heavy topics: war, extinction, grief, and sexism. At the same time, your approach is sensitive and profound. Yet, being sensitive also means feeling everything much more intensely. How does this affect your life?
I think that is an important question. The topics I work with are not particularly hopeful. This is reflected in my recent works: the albums Budynės (2020), where I reflected on the collapse of ecosystems, and Hibou (2018), which is also largely about extinction. I choose to see: an ethical, value-based backbone, the decision to see the suffering of another and to try to respond to it, understand it, and name it, is my driving force. I have a strong sense of inner justice and all these things matter to me: from inclusivity in the spaces I inhabit to global issues. Naturally, this carries a significant emotional burden, and I cannot say it is easy to live while working in my chosen fields.
The decision to look directly at problems is perhaps also a way of creating balance. Nevertheless, tell us what brings you hope and light in life.
Hope mostly comes from other people with similar values and from communicating with non-humans. When I volunteered and spoke with people who have worked for many years with refugees or in other areas of activism, I saw something that could perhaps be described as resilience. Maybe it arises from the understanding that we are all dependent on each other. From an ecosystemic perspective, as well as in other aspects, humans are entirely dependent on everything and everyone else; if what surrounds us were to disappear, we would die.
Do you think the key to the present and future is mutual connections and friendship?
Over the years, across different fields, I have seen that we can only change something together. Hope arises from a belief in collectives, whether of crows or humans; it does not matter, but shared work and shared existence allow us to survive the most frightening and difficult things. I find hope in various collectives and the people I meet who seemingly accept me into their non-biological family. Many people and non-humans have taught me many things, and that always provides hope: even when everything seems to be collapsing, care and protection appear when they are needed most, sometimes from people different from ourselves, and sometimes even from non-humans.
