Ilona Jurkonytė
Texts
Image Production and Curation
Other Explorations
I am a film and media researcher, film curator, and Marie
Skłodowska-Curie Actions / UKRI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews.
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© Ilona Jurkonytė. All Rights Reserved.
Swamp Pavilion – 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2018
Swamp Pavilion – Swamp School, 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2018. Photo: Brent D Ryan
Film program: Land, Water, Ice, Subsoil, and the Submarine
In 2018, I was invited by artists Nomeda
and Gediminas Urbonas to contribute to The Swamp School organized as
part of the Lithuania’s first independent national pavilion at the 16th
International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The project,
commissioned by Pippo Ciorra, presented by the Lithuanian Council for Culture,
and produced by the Architecture Fund, explored the swamp as a pedagogical,
ecological, and conceptual environment.
The Swamp School functioned as a living, evolving
pedagogical platform, structured around thematic chapters such as Swamp
Radio, Futurity Island, and Commonism, each examining
questions of sympoiesis, multispecies cohabitation, ecological imagination, and
post‑national spatial futures. As part of this multifaceted pedagogical
platform, I contributed as a tutor, presenting a curated film program titled Land,
Water, Ice, Subsoil, and the Submarine. This program was included in Futurity
Island, one of the three thematic chapters of The Swamp School. Futurity
Island engaged
with concepts of sympoiesis, multispecies futures, and
experimental ecological imaginaries, inviting participants to rethink the
material and immaterial conditions shaping future forms of living.
The Summer School component of the
pavilion was organized for students from the MIT School of Architecture and
Planning, Vytautas Magnus University, and Università Iuav di Venezia.
Participants took part in workshops, expeditions, lectures, and experimental
engagements situated within the swamp-as-method, designed as exercises in
sensing, interpreting, and reimagining entangled human–nonhuman futures.
As part of this collaborative
environment, my contribution added a cinematic dimension to the School’s
interdisciplinary dialogue, offering films that highlighted environmental
imaginaries, contested ecologies, and fluid territorialities – elements
resonant with the pavilion’s broader themes of hybridity, coexistence, and
ecological thinking.
Film still from Sunstone by Filipa César and Louis Henderson, 2017Film still from Sunstone by Filipa César and Louis Henderson, 2017