Serge Ecker (LU) is trained and qualified in digital imagery and special effects (Luxembourg and Nice, France). He is interested in representation of reality through the prism of new technologies and in collaboration with traditional handicrafts. Software for re-composition of space, georeferenced images, 3D scanning, 3D printing, digital printing and lately also hacked knitting machines are the tools he uses for this spatial neo-sculpture and rearrangement of the architectural form. He has been focusing on urban and industrial space, composed as ensembles or mere architectural details, menaced by destruction, neglect or plain ignorance. Space in transition, non-places and in-betweens is what he works with, indexing and re-appropriating them for better inquiry into our environment.

Earlier research and works were mostly based on urban landscapes or devastated areas or industrial ruins and abandoned locations, while in Nida Serge’s work will focus on the natural landscape and its textures, their capture, reconstruction and representation through new technologies and translation through the digital to the post-digital. The plan is to realize this capture work by walking and exploring the Curonian Spit, using photography as a starting point. Elements or fragments “scanned“ through this digitalization can then be analyzed as traces to be re-constructed as translations of reality. (Keywords: textures, traces, moving coastlines, in-between, artificial borders / natural borders, camouflage). 

Julie Laenkholm (DK) is a New York-based emerging artist born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Julie works in various mediums and defines herself as a sculptor. Her practice unfolds itself in a ritualistic manner with a provisional approach to materials, andengages in a conversation with new materialism by exploring “the physicality of the in-between” in the dialectic relationship between the body and its surroundings. She creates what she calls sculptural situations through both physical sculptures and site-specific performance pieces. This year she has been working with the local fishermen in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, with a song piece by the local gas station which is their daily meeting point for morning coffee. In August she opened her first Icelandic solo exhibition at Húsavík Museum. The principal focus of her practice is expectations. 

Julie Laenkholm received her Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design in 2015 with a full scholarship as the first Danish female. During her graduate years, she was a scholar at The Bikuben Foundation of New York; among various grants such as The New School Student Senate Grant, she also received the Kaare Klint Award in 2015 for her work with light.

While in Nida, Laenkholm will researchLithuania’s folksong festivals, and how singing has been used as a political argument as well as a political and spiritual relief. She is interested in the national identity of Lithuania, which seems rather complex. After the restoration of independence all walls were torn down, and the local artists Julie is acquainted withare more optimistic about future possibilities than anyone, but at the same time they have a very heavy heart resulting fromcomplicated recent history of the country.

In this contradiction, Lithuania seems to feel the oldest and the newest at the same time. I am looking forward to explore this sci-fi romanticism under the old Baltic sun.

Julie Laenkholm will open her solo exhibition at the Sodų 4 project space in Vilnius on the 26th of October.