Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule and Jonas Žukauskas initiated Neringa Forest Architecture in Nida, Lithuania. They write about their work around a Baltic forest as a constructed space, an infrastructure, an environment reliant on human actions.
Reflecting on the agency of cultural practices and institutions in framing environmental relationships, we initiated the project Neringa Forest Architecture (NFA) at Nida Art Colony (NAC) of Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA), in Nida, which is located 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. Over the past 200 years, afforestation and sequential planning on the spit have terraformed the environment to manage natural geomorphological processes. It was declared the Curonian Spit National Park in the 1990s and later, together with the part in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, included on the UNESCO world heritage list. The unique role and duty of care for this constructed cultural landscape poses complex challenges for the agencies and institutions that maintain it.
The main institutions responsible for forest management on the spit are the Curonian Spit National Park and Juodkrantė as well as the Nida forest districts belonging to the Kretinga Forestry. They plan and carry out fire prevention and landscaping, felling, design and implement open spaces, and reconstruct mountain pine forests—vast landscape areas that have reached their biological age limit. Through this work, approximately three thousand cubic metres of wood is annually logged in Neringa.
As this timber is often irregular due to coastal climatic conditions it is considered unsuitable for more complex industrial processes. Therefore, most of the logged timber is currently shredded into chips that are used by biofuel or paper producing companies. In 2015 the last sawmill operating on the spit in Juodkrantė, which was preparing lumber for local use, was closed down. The remaining affiliated workspaces and storage facilities have been or are in the process of being redeveloped to become holiday rental homes. The forestry regulations on the spit have gradually been adapted to optimise, simplify, and prioritise outsourcing timber for construction from mainland industrial suppliers, extending its geography by hundreds of kilometres.
As a continuous programme, NFA involves a growing assembly of collaborations and participants to look at this cultural landscape from myriad perspectives and practices as a case study in the context of the Baltic and Scandinavian forests, considering it as an entanglement of natural systems, representations, colonial and industrial narratives. NFA focuses on the forest as a constructed space, an infrastructure, an environment reliant on human actions—shaped, regulated, governed, and exploited.
What narrative, which history and myths form the basis of the societal regulations, agreements, political decisions, and understandings that define this landscape? Which definition of nature is used to perform the spatial arrangements and representations that this landscape stands for? Why does this landscape, this forest, look the way it does and what are the institutions that commonly formulate and implement its imaginary?
We said we would launch a programme that starts from, is based upon, and is represented by a pile of timber, first seeking possibilities to make use of the industrial process taking place in Neringa as part of NAC—an art institution invested in giving agency to matter. In order to modify the perception and enable an immersive approach to tackle some of the questions above, in dialogue with Forest Parts (a research project started in 2019 by Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas in response to the urgency of societal debate sparked by recent forestry reforms in Lithuania) we thought this material, a nearby resource, could open up possibilities for diverse practitioners residing at NAC, as well as VAA students, to engage with the local infrastructure, acknowledging and studying the specificity of this material as well as contributing a little to breaking the spell of expanding the elimination of production facilities in the Curonian Spit. This practice results in the disappearance of public facilities tailored by and for the local inhabitants as most of the space is turned into the service of holiday makers.
The Curonian Spit was declared a resort destination of Prussia by Wilhelm II in the late 19th century. Visitors from the north of Germany embarked to experience this region as a new holiday destination. In the realm of imperialism, similar to the exoticisation of remote, not yet industrialised territories with a strong presence of nature in the European colonies, the Curonian Spit underwent a comparable process. Its unique white dunes and particular habits of the seemingly isolated local inhabitants, gave space to imagination based on comparisons en vogue at the time—‘Sahara of the North’ has been an often quoted description of the grand dune surrounding Nida. Holiday makers, among them artists, writers, filmmakers, contributed to building this common imaginary based on a perception from the ‘outside’, depicted in the form of paintings, storytelling, and moving image that in retrospect continues to influence the formation of the landscape we are currently surrounded by.
A material study allows us to avert focus from the grand, distanced image to acknowledge the multiplicity of elements with their own histories and roots allowing us to trace the complex entanglements of narratives shaping nature as a human-made system. In conversation with forester Romas Andrusevićius, who is implementing logging plans and administering contractors in Nida, an agreement was made, and a process was defined that allowed NAC to purchase timber from Kretinga Forestry. The first batch of around twenty cubic metres of timber logged during the winter months was acquired in 2020 and the second in 2021. A surprisingly broad spectrum of timber is logged in Neringa, among them pine, spruce, black alder, birch, ash, robinia, linden, maple and chestnut. These logs were then cut into planks of various sizes and thicknesses by the portable sawmill operated by Nerijus Bužas.
While the timber logs are stored and cut in the front yard of NAC, the car park is turned into a public workshop. In plain sight, NAC guests and passers-by can follow the process of the timber entering this institution step by step from the nearby forest, to be used by VAA students and other practitioners associated with the NAC programme. Material processes are those that relate us to the place; local timber is not only a resource, it forms a portal, a possible entry point to study the landscape and complexity of natural processes in relation to the socio-political forces that form it.
Using the first batch of cut pine and spruce logs, a timber seasoning shed, designed by Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas was constructed in June 2020 with the help of the artist Jurgis Paškevićius and many more supporters who were visiting and residing at NAC at that time. The structure floats on steel stilts fixed on foundation pads of irregularly shaped concrete blocks salvaged from demolition works on the nearby Urbo Hill. The galvanised sheet metal roof is folded in sturdy U-shaped sections and untreated wood naturally greys from exposure to the sun and rain. The bark left on the outer edge of the boards softens the building’s silhouette against a background of regrowing woodland nearby.
Exposed to the wind, the shed is a display of different kinds of wood sampled from diverse locations in the Curonian Spit. Dedicated to the preparation and storage of this unique and, for us, invaluable material on site at NAC, it is a display of analogue data, an archive, a document, a material memory, an imprint of the landscape: the local timber sections inscribed with the morphology of growth rings reflect coastal and soil conditions resulting in twisted geometries and textures. In addition to the timber samples and timber library itself, maps, diagrams and selected stories of afforestation and logging in the Curonian Spit, printed on galvanised tin and mounted on the walls of the shed, provide facts and further information for general contextualisation and an understanding of the intertwined narratives at stake.
Time in Neringa is defined by two seasons: the high season, the summer months, buzzing with visitors and seasonal workers, and the off-season—the rest of the year. NFA works to a different time scale and, besides tourism, focuses on maintenance and infrastructure activities carried out in the spit. Instead of an ‘off-season, we call this time the ‘timber season’. This is the time when timber is selected, logged, and processed in the woodlands of the spit. This time also marks the period in which the Neringa Forest Architecture residency programme takes place. Having started in 2020, the residents have included researchers, architects, designers, and artists who develop projects around the theme of the local forest.
Besides the residency programme Neringa Forest Architecture is growing as a sedimentary infrastructure for many activities – children’s books that explore the natural world and the forest; walks organised in collaboration with local foresters, landscape planners and architects who are invested in the history, present and future of the Curonian Spit; as well as a series of talks and further occasions to share the viewpoints and create a platform using the local resource as a meeting point and common point of departure. The pile of timber becomes a signifier for shared knowledge and further debate on environmental relationships and cultural practices in the intersection of politics and technology.
This article was originally published in: Forest As a Journal, 2021.
JURGA DAUBARAITÉ and JONAS ŽUKAUSKAS are a duo of spatial practitioners currently based in Vilnius. They are curators of The Children’s Forest Pavilion, 18th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2023. EGIJA INZULE is a curator and director of Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts in Nida, Lithuania.
HEADER photo by Jonas Žukauskas
PUBLISHED: Maja 112 (spring 2023), with main topic Moratorium
