In episode 3 of Left to be Desired, artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas talk to Maja and Reuben Fowkes on the occasion of their exhibition Partially Swamped Institution at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. In addition to shedding light on the MIT-based Lithuanian artists current preoccupation with swamp intelligence, the discussion also revisits their early engagements with ecological questions around the system change of 1989-91. The conversation ranges from the environmental legacies of Soviet Lithuania and the role of ecological consciousness and activism in the fall of the system to engagements with Lithuanian science histories and socialist futurist experiments in space botany. They discuss their methodology of interdisciplinary artistic research in dialogue with scientists and communities and the influence of György Kepes as a leading historical figure at MIT and his notion of metabolism. How can art practice instigate an emerging ecology? How does living and non-living matter participate in the circulating systems of the environment and institutions? How are swamps implicated in the collective response to climate breakdown?
Left to be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.
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Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Since 2009, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas have had full-time positions with the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT. Their work has been presented at documenta11 (2002), the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004), Pro-test Lab (Vilnius, 2005-2007), the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016), and Critical Zones (ZKM, 2020), among many other exhibitions. They also conceived Villa Lituania and the Swamp School as the official Lithuanian contributions to the 52nd Venice art biennale (2007), and the 16th Venice architecture biennale (2018), respectively. They have organized symposia such as Artistic Intelligence? Making it together in the Multispecies World at the University of Bologna (2023), Zooetics+ at MIT (2018), The Future Fictions Summit at Asbrú, Reykjavík (2016). Their publications include Swamps and the New Imagination (Sternberg Press / MIT Press, forthcoming in 2023), Public Space? Lost & Found ( SA+P Press / MIT Press, 2017), and Devices for Action (MACBA, 2008). Their work is collected by the MO Museum of Modern Art, Vilnius; MACBA, Barcelona; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, among other institutions.