September residents – Vaiva Grainytė and Ieva Maslinskaitė

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.

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.