Neringa Forest Architecture (Nida) ~ Partner since 2022
Neringa Forest Architecture curated by Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule and Jonas Žukauskas is a project that initiates platforms for a multitude of practices to address controversies between extraction, biodiversity and sustainability in the forest space. As a continuous programme, NFA involves a growing assembly of collaborations and participants to read the cultural landscape of Curonian Spit forests as a case study in the context of the wider region, considering the entanglement of ecologies, representations, colonial and industrial narratives. The project seeks to assemble an intersectional view of these diverse viewpoints focusing on the agency of culture practices in enhancing the ways society senses, understands, and negotiates processes in the forest environment.
The project has its starting point in Nida, in the Lithuanian part of the Curonian Spit – a 98 km long, and 0.4–3.8 km wide sand dune that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. Here, over the past 200 years, afforestation and sequential planning on the spit have terraformed the environment to manage natural aeolian processes of wind blown sands. The unique role and duty of care for this constructed cultural landscape poses complex challenges for the agencies and institutions that maintain it declared the Curonian Spit National Park in the 1990s and later, together with the part in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, included it on the UNESCO world heritage list.
In 2023 NFA curated the Children’s Forest Pavilion, that represents Lithuania at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2023.
