Contributions

PAScapes junior researcher Ineta Šuopytė-Butkienė published article “The Vanishing Collective Farm Remains of Lithuanian Rural Landscape: Houses of Culture” in Studies in History and Theory of Architecture 4/2024, special issue “Landscape as Horizon”.

PAScapes PI Marija Drėmaitė published a review of Kateryna Malaia’s book Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. vii, 204 pp.

Published in Slavic Review. 2024;83(3):680-681. doi:10.1017/slr.2024.488.

“Everyone wants to own their own home. And not just any home, but one that is sturdier, more useful, more beautiful than the neighbour’s. We have been used to waiting in queue for the state to “give”. But the state cannot give without taking from the people. So why shouldn’t we build it ourselves?” In 1987-1988, the severe restrictions on individual construction that had been in place for several decades were lifted. Individual houses could once again be built in cities, and their size was no longer limited by living space standards. This was an opportunity for Lithuanians to realise an old dream. It seems that everyone wanted to build a house – in the first year after the lifting of the restrictions, 8,000 people in Vilnius alone applied to build a house (Statyba ir architektūra, 1988, no. 4, p. 8). Thus began a building boom that fundamentally transformed the landscape of the outskirts of Lithuania’s major cities and filled them with houses that became manifestations of freedom, individuality, dreams and status. Residential architecture of this period is often derided as irrational, primitive and therefore worthless. However, it is interesting to look at what kind of houses and how people built them. What shaped their dreams, what was the source of their inspiration? Finally, did “Kolūkinis barokas” era produce anything of value beyond the ridiculous?

Oblivion is usually understood as a lack of memory, the inability to remember. When it comes to our relationship with cities, our understanding of them, or our urban consciousness in contemporary Lithuania, forgetting is a rather intentional, chronic, silently displacing state of mind.

Smalininkai has a special place in this displacing appropriation: it is forgotten both as a non-Lithuanian and a not part of Lithuania  city, but as a Jewish, German, German-speaking Lithuanian (lietuvninkai) city, which originated and flourished in the Kingdom of Prussia and in the German Empire, and, to a certain extent, also in the Klaipėda region.

During the Soviet occupation, the authoritarian landscape developed as a space of radical physical transformations, where the experiences of those changes were suppressed, representation was censored, and perception was ideologically directed. The work of Lida Meškaitytė, a miniature artist who lived and created in the village of Antšvenčiai in the Jurbarkas district, stands as a unique testament to this environment. A self-taught, disabled young woman from the formerly German Klaipėda region quickly gained recognition from the authorities of the time due to her rural origins and depictions of pastoral landscapes. However, this recognition came at a cost—even today, the artist’s personality and creative legacy are often evaluated uncritically, overshadowing the contradictions of her era and the environmental changes of the time.

The Colorado potato beetle, which spread across Europe after the First World War and reached Soviet Lithuania in the second half of the 1960s, eventually captured not only potato fields but also the imagination of potato growers. Associative images, such as collective searches or bottles of alcohol, and puzzling theories about the beetle’s methods of escape, continue to live on, albeit in a diminished form, to this day. When did the myths surrounding the pest originate, and why did it take on additional meanings? How was it welcomed in Soviet Lithuania, what mechanisms were in place to ensure the superiority of the planned struggle declared by the Soviets? And what did this struggle look like in practice?

Time, Waste, Extinction workshop, held on September 17-18, 2024, is a collaboration between PAScapes, Acid Horizon and Nicolas de Warren of the Penn State Philosophy department. The workshop explores the intersections of extinction, temporality, and ecological ethics, featuring lectures on topics such as human extinction, temporal justice, pollution, and responsibility in the Anthropocene.

Time, Waste, Extinction workshop, held on September 17-18, 2024, is a collaboration between PAScapes, Acid Horizon and Nicolas de Warren of the Penn State Philosophy department. The workshop explores the intersections of extinction, temporality, and ecological ethics, featuring lectures on topics such as human extinction, temporal justice, pollution, and responsibility in the Anthropocene.