NAC Residencies in March 2021
- Published on Monday, 01 March 2021 18:30
Nina Svensson, Twin Forest, refined and defined by gifts (2020). Courtesy Nina Svensson.
In March, at NAC, we celebrate not only the 10-year anniversary of this institution that opened on 19 March 2011, but also mark one year of the pandemic and think back over this challenging period that we have been navigating through.
March is also the final month of the timber season in Nida, and the final month of the winter session of the Neringa Forest Architecture residency programme. NFA is in full action this month and will continue in autumn 2021, when the next timber season will begin. In March ecologist Emma Holmberg, editor Anne Hovad Fischer, researcher Agata Marzecova, architecture researcher Signe Pelne, artist Nina Svensson, furniture designer Philipp von Hase, and filmmakers and artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Dovydas Korba work in Nida together with great support by NFA programme’s co-curators Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas.
Emma Holmberg is a human ecologist living and working in Stockholm. Over the past year, Emma has begun depicting endangered species in 3D as an attempt to deal with curiosity and angst related to the loss of the unknown. In Nida, she will start a project to dismantle the biological, material, and eco-social components of the pine as a living species and a product. Her wish is to seek traditional knowledges and new interpretations of a tree that enable different life forms on both sides of the Baltic Sea. Her project will be resumed at Ställbergs gruva this summer.
Anne Hovad Fischer works within film, education and research. She is based in Copenhagen. She is interested in the social potential of visual storytelling, spanning many fields such as environmental studies, performativity, vision, belonging, and creativity. When appropriate, humour and banalities are applied as a tool as well as a wish for expanding the boundaries of what is expected, to challenge the norms that surround us. In Nida, Fischer will work on her research on the topic of humans and nature (human nature).
Agata Marzecova is a researcher in ecology, photography, and new media based in Tallinn. As an environmental scientist, she has participated in a range of research projects that have analysed changes in lakes and their catchments during the transition from the Holocene to Anthropocene periods. In recent years, she has become increasingly involved in art-science collaborations which explore the porous boundaries between the science, aesthetics, technology, and politics of environments. As part of the Neringa Forest Architecture residency, Marzecova explores the relationship between research methodologies and forest knowledge. Her research departs from ‘forest’ as a general category to examine how certain types of forest came to be regarded as ‘better’ than others and how different practices and values contribute to the emergence of different forest ecosystems.
Signe Pelne is an architectural designer and researcher within the field of architecture, living and working in Riga and London. Pelne is an alumnus of the University of Westminster and is currently completing her MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art. She has also studied in Copenhagen and Beijing as well as experienced multiple architectural workshops in Canada, Germany, India, Latvia, and Estonia. Pelne’s work is a mix of research and architectural practice. It revolves around multidisciplinary work that is founded in socio-economic research. Mainly analysing the historical, architectural, and ecological contexts of the site, her projects focus on producing sustainable and socially positive environments.
Nina Svensson is an artist living and working in Stockholm. Her artistic practice focuses on social processes where attentive and observant negotiations can make visible the distribution and valuation of different forms of capital and ownership in contemporary society. Svensson usually works with other professions, such as ethnological field studies. She carries out educational trips, and mimics popular adult education formats through educational circles in workplaces. In Nida she will be working with the idea of Friendships, an exchange of knowledge and historical experiences between forests in two countries: Sweden and Lithuania.
Philipp von Hase is a furniture designer and maker based in Bergen. Before settling in Bergen, he was a journeyman, beginning his route in Hannover and manufacturing furniture in Copenhagen. Over the past decade he has been focusing on his own small-scale timber productions. A wood-oriented furniture maker, in his work, von Hase seeks to integrate the study of forest ecology, dealing with both single tree autecology and overall natural forest ecology. Learning from silvology, the biological science of studying forests and woods, von Hase incorporates the understanding of natural forest ecosystems into his craftsmanship.
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė explores the tensions between objective and imaginary realities in her art works, asking relevant questions about humanity and humans as a species. Barzdžiukaitė's work is characterised as having specific harmonies between humour and serenity, simplicity and intellectuality, and her documentary manner of recording phenomena is combined with a well-thought-out structure of works. In 2019 Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (together with Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte) represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale with the opera-performance Sun and Sea (Marina). Her film Acid Forest, created together with Dovydas Korba, about tourists watched by cormorants on the Curonian Spit, has been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival and other film festivals. Rugilė is currently developing a work with the working title Beauty is a Winner, Winner is a Queen.
Dovydas Korba works with film, installation and visual arts. He studied Photography and Media Arts at Vilnius Academy of Arts, and at Transarts Interdisciplinary Arts Program from Die Angewandte Academy in Vienna. In his work, Korba studies language, re-creation, and different expressions of media as translation strategies. Korba also studied film production at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and together with Rugile Barzdžiukaitė, has founded the public institution Neon Realism. He is currently developing a creative project called Black Boxes.
Neringa Forest Architecture residency is co-funded by NERINGA Lithuanian Capital of Culture 2021, Lithuanian Council for Culture and Nordic Culture Point.