Awakened Animals

Akee together with the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LIAA) is organising a day camp for children aged 8-10 years old from the Pakruojis district in the spaces of the Akee residence, as well as in the surrounding fields and meadows, taking place between 16-19 June 2025. The camp programme is designed and implemented by LIAA members – artists Gailė Griciūtė, Ieva Rižė, and educational programme curator Vilius Vaitiekūnas.The theme of this year’s camp – Awakened Animals – invites children to engage in imaginative and sensory games that move away from the usual rules of play and the everyday sense of the body. Just as animals react to the faintest rustle or refraction of light, children will be invited to trust the sensitivity of their own bodies – to act on feeling rather than experience.

During the camp, participants will be invited to experience their body and its relationship to its environment in a new way through movement, sound and enhanced attention. Sounds – both natural and bodily – will become the direction of action rather than the background: bird calls, wind moving linden leaves, unexpected positions of bodies in release and rhythms of breathing will become the field of exploration through which new experiences of the self and the changing rural areas will be revealed.

Through the different creative strategies that Gailė Griciūtė and Ieva Rižė use in their practice, the children will be invited to set aside the usual formats of communication and play and enter into an experiential process: to listen, to slow down, to move themselves and each other through material, sound and silence.

Gailė Griciūtė is a composer, performer and sound artist. She belongs to the generation of 21st century creators for whom versatility of creative identity is the norm. Griciūtė creates both sounds and images, and implements her ideas in a variety of forms: from scores with the smallest details (Thangtong Gyalpo), to performances (Eye Gymnastics), to improvisations that are created and performed only in the present moment. She performs with the collectives Mold, Eye Gymnastics and Weld Mignon, and her most frequent partner is a prepared piano. Her interdisciplinary approach is based on the search for a specific sound, experimentation, and attention to process (both in her work with performers and collectives, and musically, especially in improvisation). In her work we can see the identification of composer-performer-listener, their equivalence, the importance of different perspectives and self-reflection. Griciūtė strives for the listener’s individual hearing, intimate experiences, so we would not find specific, unifying themes in her work.

Ieva Rižė is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Vilnius. She graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a Bachelor’s degree in Monumental Painting and Stage Design and a Master’s degree in Contemporary Sculpture. Her practice includes three-dimensional painting, sculptural installations, video and performative practices, often involving texts, sounds or drawings. Rize focuses on the human psyche, temporality, relationships within closed groups, and themes of identity and power. She is intrigued by in-between spaces and states: inanimate material, life form, people, objects and concepts, their dependencies and the tensions that tell a story. The aesthetics of Ieva’s work is often shaped by short- or long-term creative rituals or impulsivity, while the archives of individual imagination are stirred by abstractions.

The curator of the educational programme, Vilius Vaitiekūnas, is an educator and producer of various cultural activities and formats. In 2018, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Minerva Academy, the Netherlands and completed a pre-graduate programme in Art and Cognitive Science at the University of Groningen. Vaitiekūnas is an alumnus of Rupert Alternative Education (2021) and Inland Academy (2022), and is currently studying in the Master of Arts in Arts and Media programme at Aalto University, Helsinki. In 2019, together with his colleagues, he founded the culture and education space “Akee” in Aleknaičiai village in Pakruojis district. He has worked as a curator of education and community engagement activities at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, assisted in the project “Children’s Forest Pavilion” in the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, and coordinated the presentation of the project at the Stasys Museum in Panevėžys in 2024.Since 2024, he has been the head of educational programmes at the Stasys Museum, and the same year he curated the project “Experiment Platform” of the Architektūros fondas, together with Martynas Germanavičius.

The camp will take place between 16-19 June, daily from 10:00 to 16:00. The camp is for children aged 8-10 years old, free of charge.

Project designer – Kornelija Žalpytė
Educational assistant – Simona Čemoškaitė

Organised by Aleknaičiai Culture and Education Space (Akee) in cooperation with the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association.
Partner – Pakruojo r. Lygumų pagrindinė mokykla.

Day Camp’s documentation:

LIAA activities are financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.