- Residency period: Winter 2025
- Individual Residency
During her residency at Nida Art Colony in December, Chinese-born artist Dakota Guo worked on her research project “Tools for Speculative Archaeology”, which examines archaeology’s symbolic and material entanglements with the underworld.
Responding to the landscape of the Curonian Spit and its drifting dunes, the artist’s work as a speculative archaeologist begins from the futile attempt to measure, mark, and uncover a ground that continuously undoes itself. This inquiry unfolds through the devising of two marking tools.
The first is “Krikštai” – hybrid pagan–Christian wooden grave markers historically used in this area. Dakota was particularly drawn to their placement at the foot of the grave, helping the dead to stand up upon their resurrection.
When “Krikštai” failed to mark the resting places of the dead due to the ever-drifting dunes, a second tool was introduced. The “Curonian Compass” is a fabricated wooden bi-leg instrument, imagined as having been used to determine where the remains are. Activated through repeated gestures of alignment and circular inscription across the dunes, the compass does not resolve instability but inhabits it, operating through a form of marking coextensive with the dunes’ ongoing deformation.
The residency was supported by CBK Rotterdam.
