Neringa Forest Architecture (Vilnius, Nida, Basel ) ~ Partner since 2022
Neringa Forest Architecture is an architecture, art, and research collective focused on the agency of cultural practices in framing environmental relationships and enhancing ways of sensing and understanding forest. NFA involves a growing assembly of collaborators and participants to read forest as constructed space – an environment of natural systems governed, exploited, and regulated by human interventions, technologies, industries, institutions and agencies. The collective works through transdisciplinary engagements with diverse partners, developing site-specific work that takes form in publishing, exhibitions, film, educational programmes, and other context-specific formats.
The collective has its starting point in the Curonian Spit, a sand dune that separates the lagoon from the Baltic Sea, where afforestation formed a constructed cultural landscape containing the aeolian processes of wind-blown sands. Developing a project at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020, NFA established a process to redirect timber cut in the forests of the Curonian Spit, a protected cultural landscape of afforested sand dunes, from biofuel processing to construct a Timber Archive and Library. This archive is both: a material storage facility and a material document of the environmental forces and processes shaping the forest landscape in this unique site. Building on this resource, NFA initiated an artistic research residency programme, inviting artists, architects, filmmakers, researchers and geographers to develop their inquiries into the multiple directions of intersectional research that the forest enables.
NFA runs Kirvarpa Books, and since 2020 has curated a residency programme at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. In 2023, NFA designed, curated and produced the Children’s Forest Pavilion, Lithuania, for the Venice Architecture Biennale. As part of the Season of Lithuania in France 2024, NFA carried out research beyond the Curonian Spit for an exhibition at arc en rêve in Bordeaux, presenting a playscape installation devoted to the many histories, practices and processes that have shaped and continue to shape the Landes forests in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region.
NFA projects are conceived with long-term and multiple lives in mind. Following its presentation in Venice, the Children’s Forest Pavilion branched into two distinct sites. The roof structure is now installed in the old-growth forest in Juodkrantė, where it functions as the Neringa Forest Classroom, a destination for forest walks and environmental education workshops. The play platforms, shadow play projections and other elements are installed at the Education Space of the Stasys Museum, supporting its research and learning activities led by the pavilion’s contributors together with the museum team.
Website
Neringa Forest Architecture (@forestparts)
Kirvarpa Books @kirvarpa
Neringa Forest Architecture@DAI:
2025-2026 COOP study group ~ TENDING FORESTS IN OUR MINDS
2024-2025 COOP study group ~ FOREST INSCRIPTIONS
2023-2024 COOP study group ~ FOREST IS LONG-TERM