- Residency period: Winter 2026
- Individual Residency
During her residency at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Indrė Umbrasaitė has immersed herself in the “On Winterness” project, a multi-year research project exploring the disappearing cultures of the cold. Arriving during a rare, heavy winter, she utilised the local landscape to investigate how seasonal cycles shape human practices and spatial articulation. By digging into the archives of the Picture Library East Prussia and conducting field notations along the Curonian Spit and Lagoon, she is reconstructing a ‘restitutive map of the winter season’ of the region. This map documents and reveals cultural techniques – such as historical under-ice fishing, commuting across frozen landscapes or the deflection of river ice drifts – that are being erased by both political history and environmental change.
Indrė Umbrasaitė is an architect and researcher whose practice bridges academic rigor and artistic exploration. Having taught at universities in Vienna, Graz, Vilnius, and Bolzano and collaborated with such institutions as MIT Climate Visions, she seeks to move beyond the ‘tabula rasa’ mindset of modernism. Instead, Indrė adopts a methodology of working with the given, and treating the planet as a fragile garden. Her work focuses on how human and non-human bodies dwell within specific ecologies, searching for new stabilities in a time of rapid climatic shifts.
