Researcher Jurga Daubaraitė and architect Jonas Žukauskas began working on Forest Parts during their residency in Nida in November 2019 as part of the Neringa Municipality Scholarship programme. Forest Parts is an ongoing project that offers to perceive the forest as an infrastructure formed by civic consensus. The unique cultural landscape of the Curonian Spit and the forestation process initiated in the 19th century serve as a case study of forest management works in this complex space to interrelate a series of ecological, recreational, representational, and industrial narratives.

The Curonian Spit, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a unique cultural landscape – a 98km-long sand dune spit shared by Lithuania and Russia, separating the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. Here, forests planted with relentless human efforts over many years formed an environment dedicated to manage natural geomorphological processes. 

The contemporary forests of the Curonian Spit are a civic object where all actions are planned and executed by humans who translate nature processes into data, tables, systems, and regulation. Here, biodiversity is looked after, formed and represented by a range of state and civic agencies. Forest Parts offers to perceive the forest as an infrastructure formed by civic consensus.

THE PINE SAMPLE 

Installed in the public space in Nida, close to Thomas Mann House, The Pine Sample introduces the project to the general public and gives an overview about the historical and current processes of the formation of this landscape. The Pine Sample comes from the Grobštas nature reserve at the Lithuanian - Russian border where in 2019, Curonian Spit National Park foresters cleared self-planted, 30-40 year old pines to open up the dunes from overgrowth. The pine was carefully dug out by hand in November 2019 to keep its root system as intact as possible. The pine’s structure is revealed by a longitudinal cut from the apex to its roots, where among grooves, the seed from which the tree grew is visible. You can download here a pdf combining text and images of The Pine Sample.

As further step in the research process, Jurga Daubaraitė, Jonas Žukauskas, and NAC director Egija Inzule initiated a new residency and research programme Neringa Forest Architecture Residency to take place in 2020–2022. With this new focus, NAC seeks to bring together designers, architects, artists, historians, scientists, and forest researchers to work together, to participate in interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation, and to actualise the authentic legacy of this cultural landscape.

Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas are a duo of spatial practitioners currently based in Vilnius. Through architectural, curatorial and research projects they aim to create new relations between societies and their environment, past and future, by seeking to rearticulate architecture across a wider ecology of practices.
They curated the exhibition The Baltic Material Assemblies at AA Gallery and RIBA in London (2018), and were co-curators of The Baltic Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition at Venice Biennale (2016), and co-editors of The Baltic Atlas published by Sternberg (2016). Currently Daubaraitė and Žukauskas are working on the Creative Playground and Garden in Vilnius and are developing Neringa Forest Architecture Residency programme with Timber Material Cycle at NAC.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NAC would like to thank the Curonian Spit National Park team, especially Gražina Žemaitienė and director Aušra Feser, the Neringos Komunalininkas team and director Danguolė Seselskytė for their advice and production support. Nida and Juodkrantė foresters: Kęstutis Dikšas, Romas Andrusevičius, Viktoras Kolokšanskis. 

The project is co-funded by Neringa Municipality.