Video and sound installation
Chamber Hall
Open admission for 1 hour before and after the festival events
19th century. In the 19th century, according to a strict arborist plan, the Curonian Spit sandy areas were planted with mountain pine trees, which were supposed to help contain the sand that covered the villages of the local inhabitants as well as the sand that was turning into the entrance to the Klaipėda Harbour. The impressive scale of the project has created a new image of a heavily forested spit. After more than a hundred years, the Curonian Spit's masses of mountain pine forests, which have outgrown their natural age and become scarred, have become as combustible as gunpowder.
Human-caused fires have repeatedly scorched large areas of the Curonian Spit's mountain forests. Each of them has opened up gloomy forest clearings that the public and foresters were eager to replant. However, according to biologists studying the Curonian Spit, by burning part of the upland pine forest, the fire has also opened up space for greater biodiversity to develop naturally in areas previously dominated by upland pine forests and created habitats for endangered birds.
Fire is commonly seen as a destructive force. Uncontrolled and increasingly frequent wildfires, as the climate warms, are destroying much valuable vegetation and natural habitats. But according to environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, we have too much of the wrong kind of fire and not enough of the right kind. Fire, even in cases like this, acts as a natural forester, destroying the cultural landscape but opening up space for the natural one to flourish.
The art journalist and artist Adam Zube, in collaboration with the Nida folk dance collective Kalnapušė, continues the research initiated in the Nida Art Colony's Neringa Forest Architecture residency with the presentation of a sonic memory room, a space that tells the story of the 2014 Kalnapušė Fire in the Curonian Spit. Interviews with those who fought the fires, voices, dance, harmony and field recordings from the burn site intertwine to form a chorus of natural and human loss.
