Verpėjos Creative Pastures exhibition

Verpėjos is happy to invite you to the opening of exhibition with participating artists in the Creative Pastures residency programme. It will take place at Marcinkonys station gallery, Kastinio 1C, on 15th October, from 6 pm.

8 artists have been invited to take part in the Creative Pastures programme of the Verpejos Art Residency in 2022. During the month-
long residency, the artists, living two at a time in a traditional Kabeliai village farmhouse, were shepherding a flock of Skudde sheep. Sheep, the main axis of the “Spinners’ Creative Pastures”, become a connecting part of the village community and no longer function as units of meat or wool, raised according to purely material levers, but as a platform for creativity, a school of coexistence with the Other, mediators between man and the natural and social environment. They transform us from tourists who consume the environment into participants in places.

During the exhibition opening there will be a presentation of publication “Shepherds’ Notes vol. I”.

On Sunday 16 October, 2-5pm, children and adults are invited to a spinning and weaving workshop by artists Karl Logge and Marta Romani. Participants will use simple weaving frames constructed from interesting objects and materials found locally, yarn from local sheep’s wool and specially made tools. Both first-time and more experienced weavers are invited to work together to create a collective tapestry combining personal expression with various elements found in the surrounding natural environment.

Exhibition participants:

Nadine Baldow is a visual artist based in Berlin whose work predominantly addresses the complex relationship between “culture” and “nature” and their ongoing impact on each other. She is observing this relationship on many different levels and raises questions like: Are we still part of nature? What is ‚nature’ after all? Could our planet, as we ourselves have shaped it, be what `true nature’ is? Baldow studied with professor Eberhard Bosslet, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden after completing a wood carving apprenticeship in the Alps. Her work has been exhibited in Switzerland, Ireland, Malta, Germany, Poland, Czech, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Korea, and India.

Kristin Fredricksson is an award-winning performance-maker and a researcher, lecturer, mover and puppeteer. Her themes are the ecological body, climate and civilisational collapse, autobiography, trauma and memory. Fredricksson’s work has been presented in theatres such as the Barbican in London and La Villette in Paris, in outdoors performance festivals such as Norfolk & Norwich Festival and as installations in inside and outside spaces. She teaches histories and philosophies of art, somatic approaches to art making and the ecological body on the MA Art, Society, Nature at The Margate School in the UK.

Mar Serinyà Gou is a visual and performing artist. She holds a Phd in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. She graduated voice studies at the Conservatory of Barcelona and different studies on consciousness of movement and systemic methodology. Her passion is to study natural rhythms of the human body, nature, and society and how they live together in harmony. Her body is an instrument to listen and to explore what moves her when she is in a specific situation or place. Serinyà Gou works and performances have been presented in different museums, centers and festivals nationally and internationally.

Jurgis Bernatonis is an artist living and working in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is researching various algorithmic bodies and the rituals they are creating. Jurgis seeks to develop a medium, in which the invisible things embody certain forms and interact with the environment. His artworks investigate the problems related to digital data interpretation and representation. Jurgis Bernatonis has finished MA studies at Vilnius Art Academy (2015), also participated at Rupert alternative education program (2020). 

Monique Besten is an artist, writer and educator based in Spain and the Netherlands. She makes long-distance performative walks through Europe, work site-specific and researches slow ways of being and connections between artistic media and different fields of life. Monique writes for The Dark Mountain Project and teaches Performance Art and Artistic Survival Skills at the University of the Arts Utrecht (NL). She was trained as a historian before she started studying art (Rietveld Academy Amsterdam NL, Bauhaus University Weimar DE). Monique has been focusing on walking as an artistic medium. She has developed a series titled “A Soft Armour”: The artist made long performative walks through Europe in a three piece business suit (f.e. in 2015 from Barcelona to the COP21 in Paris), focusing on slow and simple ways of being, ecology, surviving outdoors, spending time with people on the road and in nature, collecting stories, often embroidering the suit while/in between walking, writing daily online.

Roseline Lambert is a poet and anthropologist. She debuted with poetry in 2012 and has since published and performed in diverse literary reviews and events in Quebec, in France and in the UK. “Clinique”, her first collection of poems about agoraphobia and the metaphor of asylum, was published in 2016. Her second poetry book “Les couleurs accidentelles” was launched in the fall of Lambert is the winner of the Quebec Felix-Antoine Savard Poetry Prize for best poem published in 2017. In 2021, she completed her PhD in Anthropology at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, where she is a member of the Centre for Sensory Studies. Her research-creation thesis deals with the experience of agoraphobia in Oslo using a methodology that intertwines poetry and anthropology. Her current eco-poetry work is funded by Canada Art Council and Quebec Council of Arts and Literature and by the Quebec Research Fund/Society & Culture.

Ching-Yu Cheng is an artist from Taiwan. She tends to work on the project which is community- based, mostly her works are being shaped slowly through long-term and constant field research like an archaeologist in art form, and to give a response in a spacial form that still involved certain architectural thinking. The reality pushes the artist to have lots different identities as a struggling artist who’s living overseas, language-teacher, cook, clerk, waitress, tile-painter and. etc. She made fun of herself that she’s freelancing-everything. And all these personal experiences inspired her art practice creating a common ground from society to connect with the public and that’s one of the best parts being an artist in this case for her.

With backgrounds in animation, design, live-art and installation, Marta Romani (b. Brescia, Italy) and Karl Logge (b. Sydney, Australia) live and work on the island of Sant Antioco, Sardinia (Italy). Moving specifically to the island in 2014 so that they could become students of the master weaver Chiara Vigo. Their practice looks at how the ancient methods of weaving, spinning and dying can be used to explore themes of crisis, adaptation and interconnectedness. Using a mix of speculative, sustainable and critical art-based aesthetic and research methods they engage the material alchemy and timeless gestures of weaving as a platform for generating new modes of transmission, exchange and encounter. Both together and separately they have worked with various institutions in Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Australia and Portugal to present projects in a range of gallery-based and unconventional contexts.

Exhibition time: October 16-October 30,
Opening of the exhibition on October 15, 6 p.m.
Address: Marcinkonių station gallery, Kastinio st. 1C, Marcinkonys, Varėna district
The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12:00 to 17:00.
Organized by: VšĮ Verpėjos
The exhibition is supported by:
Lithuanian Council of Culture and Ministry of culture Taiwan