Meeting with September residents – Vaiva Grainytė and Ieva Maslinskaitė

September 29, 3 – 7 p.m. we invite you to meet Ieva Maslinskaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, the art
residents of “Verpejos” for the month of September.

The “Verpejos” art residency is located in a traditional homestead in the village of Kabeliai in the
Varėna district. In September, two artists invited by a competition – Ieva Maslinskaitė and Vaiva
Grainytė – became the hostesses of the homestead.

The artists will share their creative ideas, unique creative fellowship and authentic local experience
in herding and caring for a herd of skudde sheep.
“Verpėjos’ creative pastures” intended to focus on the slow process of artistic research and the long-
term value for the creators and audience participating in it. In close communion with animals and
nature, we invite the creators to rethink the relationship between contemporary humans and the
environment in the epoch of the Anthropocene.

Ieva Maslinskaitė (1999, LT) is an interdisciplinary artist from Lithuania. Currently, she lives and
works between Vilnius, Lithuania, and The Netherlands. Driven by the belief that moving towards
being ecological requires destabilizing our binary thinking towards the environment, Maslinskaitė’s
interest lies in co-creating with other species, such as microorganisms or fungi, as well as organic
and artificial processes to make temporary and mutating installations, sculptures, and other image-
based works. Ieva has recently graduated from the Photography department at the Royal Academy
of Art The Hague. Coming from a photography background, her practice is centered around
dismantling the medium from an anthropocentric perspective and putting it back together through
an ecocentric perspective, which often requires counteracting contemporary image culture’s aims of
being fixed, reproducible, and permanent.

Vaiva Grainytė (1984, LT) is a writer, poet, and playwright, her text-based practice shifts between
genres, interdisciplinary works and publications. As an author she takes action as an observant
anthropologist: challenged by Grainyte’s poetic interpretation, mundane social issues take on a
paradoxical nature. Her books – the book of essays Beijing Diaries (2012) and the poetry
collection Gorilla Archives (2019) – were nominated for Book of the Year and included in the
twelve most creative books of the year in Lithuania. She is the librettist and co-author of
internationally acclaimed contemporary operas: the opera-performance Sun and Sea, which was
awarded the Golden Lion at Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art (2019), and opera Have a Good
Day! (2013), which earned 6 international awards in Europe. In 2022 she published the bilingual
(Lithuanian and English) collage novel Roses and Potatoes. Her work has been translated into more
than ten languages.

Venue: Kabeliu st. 7, Kabeliai village, Varėna district.
Date: 29.09.2023
Time: 3 – 6 p.m.
Organized by: VšĮ “Verpėjos”
Supported by: Lithuanian Cultural Council
Cover photo – Laura Garbštienė