The 6th symposium on Hybrid Natures will run in parallel with the exhibition “Hybrid(...)scapes” from 23rd to 25th of July, 2016 and will bring together more than 25 artists, scientists, curators, writers and architects, who will reflect on and experience hybrid states, natures and landscapes in Nida over two days.

If the image of the Curonian Spit comes up as an ideal natural environment, it would be useful to revisit Bruno Latour’s essay “We Have Never Been Modern” (1991). Following the main ideas of this text, it becomes impossible to separate nature from culture, society from technology, art from politics, because each new attempt to purify these categories generates more new hybrids.

The Curonian Spit is one such hybrid: its body consists of both nature and culture, which has been using technology for centuries to plant forests and shape the terrain, joined by underwater hybid creatures generating the energy for conce(rn)(ntrate)s of capital and politics.

During the symposium, walks, sounds, performances, collective readings and talks will serve as vehicles for encountering various hybrids, species of plankton, beetles as media, heterogeneous geological states and cyberbiological bodies, and tangible digital environments.

Curators: Vytautas Michelkevičius and Pakui Hardware

Keywords: green cube, political hybrids, brackishness, hybrid landscape, landscape as timescape…

Symposium is organised by NGO MENE in collaboration with Nida Art Colony of VAA. Supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Location: Nida Art Colony is located in a resort town on the Baltic Sea coast, in a hybrid site, National park of Curonian Spit which is recognized by UNESCO as a world heritage site – “sandy and wooded cultural landscape”. Curonian Spit is washed by salty Baltic Sea waters and fresh Curonian lagoon waters which at some point become brackish which adds another hybrid ecosystem here. Curonian Spit is divided by half between Lithuania and Russian Federation (Kaliningrad), so Nida Art Colony is only 2 km away from Russian/EU border.

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Exhibition: Symposium follows the exhibition “Hybrid(…)scapes” (opening 6pm, 23^rd July) which is produced by artists staying in a residency from June to July in Nida Art Colony and curated by Vytautas Michelkevičius. Artists list.