Nets and Connections – Workshop & Installation with Jolanta Sendaitė-Paulauskienė
🕸️ Part of the ūmėdė Festival / Bathing & Beyond Program : DAYFri 17.10, 15:00 – 18:00 / Saturday 18.10, 12:00-15:00 (Advance registration is required at the festival )
💧 Together, we reclaim threads once lost to the sea, reweaving stories of resilience, repair, and renewal.
An installation and participatory workshop reimagining discarded fishing nets as vessels of ecological memory and transformation. Participants explore the tactile imprints of marine life and the passage of time on the nets, engaging in dialogue about water pollution, cultural continuity, and collective repair.
“Exploring the waters, outer and inner. All these waters merge, flow into each other, intertwine, and inevitably meet. Therefore, the pollution of the Baltic Sea is of particular concern—how tightly we are connected and how little we know about it.”
Workshop Focus:
Working with “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing nets that have haunted the Baltic Sea for decades.
Transforming these remnants into tactile narratives of resilience and memory.
Encouraging participants to touch and translate physical traces of time and tide into sculptural and sensory language.
Nets have been used since prehistoric times for collecting plants, berries, seeds, and other products.
The Baltic Sea is one of the youngest and most polluted seas on Earth. Plastic fishing nets persist for centuries, entangling marine life and eroding biodiversity.
Organizations worldwide are conducting net-cleaning projects to counter this ecological threat.
What stories can fingers tell? Fingers and hands are the main sensory organs through which Jolanta experiences touch and perceives the surrounding environment. Through tactile sensitivity, slowing down, movement, and rhythm, she patiently weaves water—its ripples extending through time and space, connected to climate change and the global water crisis.
In her installation Entrapment , also part of the festival, , Jolanta weaves a local water story and the image of a bird trapped in fishermen’s nets on the seabed. Often feeling trapped herself, she explores the sensation of being unable to escape or break free, creating a tapestry that echoes her body and listens to it. This work investigates water’s fluid systems as a network of knowledge, highlighting water as unknowable, ever-changing, and deeply relational. Through care, tenderness, and nurturing, she creates hydrocommons of wet relations that are both intangible and meaningful.
Jolanta Sendaitė-Paulauskienė’s practice is based on the principles of processual art that emphasize not the final product (the work of art), but the processivity of thinking itself. Natural and naturally variable materials in her work, such as bacteria, mushrooms, and systems of plant roots, as well as natural dyeing, enable her to reconsider the relationship with the materials. She discovered natural dyeing with plants. Plants and the secrets they hold provide an opportunity to establish a harmonious relationship with the environment around us and encourage us to maintain a living tradition that is being passed down from generation to generation. She has a Master's degree from Vilnius Academy of Art.
https://www.instagram.com/jolanta.sendaite_paulauskiene
Bathing & Beyond is a living laboratory where bodies, waters, and elemental forces co-create knowledge and practices of care. It opens liminal spaces in which more-than-human agencies shape collective presence, cultivating new forms of ecological imagination.
Bathing & Beyond: Bathing, Art and Ecology in the Age of Water at ūmėdė Festival – Rooted and Off-Grid, SODAS 2123, Full program :
https://edenbaths.com/2025/09/16/bathing-beyond-bathing-art-and-ecology-in-the-age-of-water-at-umede-rooted-and-off-grid/
http://umede.lt/bathing/
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