Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas Embrace the Swamp

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas’ retrospective, ‘Partially Swamped Institution’, is a triumph of wetland, bog and mud. In the courtyard of Vilnius’s National Gallery of Art, Structure of Affect: Sensing Plants, Doodling Robots (2023) is a multi-layered model of a swamp placed on anodized-aluminium grids propped up by found bricks, left over from the institution’s re-modelling in 2009. The artists have been rethinking the notion of the ‘swamp’ since 2018, when they proposed their Swamp Pavilion – accompanied by a series of talks, workshops and fieldtrips – at the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture. In the attempt to rehabilitate this concept, the artists advance a model in opposition to dominant interpretations of the swamp as a hostile and undeveloped space. To this end, in Vilnius, audiences are greeted by an immersive sensorial experience: certain plants smell of lemongrass and berries, others are rough on the surface, whilst the whirring of an air-pollution detector might be mistaken for cicadas.

Curated by Lars Bang Larsen, the artists’ first major solo show in a Lithuanian institution extends from the ground-floor courtyard to the gallery’s basement exhibition hall, which contains a selection of sound and object-based installations, videos, interactive games and an augmented reality app spanning more than a decade of the artists’ widespread production. Swamp Game: Eat Me (2020), for example, invites gallery-goers to move through virtual surroundings projected onto a large screen, whose various possible forms and inhabitants are based on the drawings which accompanied the first treatise on swamps ever published – by German botanist Carl Albert Weber – in 1902. Participants can be eaten by a fungus or navigate their way through an other-than-human reality, thus exploring new modes of coexistence between forms of life beyond human environmental domination.

Archive materials from the artists’ practice – including photographs, drawings and text-based documents – are screened on a series of overhead projectors, documenting the pair’s interest in the natural world, community-based activism and the political agency of ecosystems. Examples include a selection of actions and performances organized by Žalias Lapas (Green Leaf), an art and performance group co-founded in 1988 by Gediminas Urbonas in response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and, more broadly, to an international conservative political agenda. These archive materials not only enhance visitors’ experience of the show but, being projected on random rotation, imbue the exhibition with a shifting dynamic.

A throughline in many works, the artists’ interest in non-human experience is perhaps most evident in the research and design project River Runs (2012). Displayed on several monitors placed on a freestanding wooden structure, the work speculates on the many possible alliances enabled by ‘swampian’ correlations while also highlighting the unexplored potential of aquatic environments as public spaces. A series of interviews with various fluvial dwellers – an art student, a river historian and a water expert – documents different modes of inhabiting the river. In front of this, on a larger screen, the artists present footage of the launch of Jellyfish Lily – a prototype ‘wearable’ craft comprising a sheet of plastic suspended above a ring of floats that users can manoeuvre using their bodies. Shot in Oxford, the video shows the makeshift structures floating down the river, while participants move about on the plastic as though swimming, but without entering the water. At times, the participants appear trapped, as their uncoordinated movements demonstrate the difficulty of the task at hand. Yet, the prototypes move. They have embraced the swamp.

_{Main image: Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Partially Swamped Institution, 2023, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artists and National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; photograph: Gintare Grigenaite}