<

It was a great pleasure to take part in the 8th Inter-format Symposium on Rites and Terrabytes 20-24th June, 2018 with a project called Sylvan Skinship. The symposium happened in beautiful Nida Art Colony in Lithuania. The symposium was organised by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts in collaboration with Inter-PAGAN network (including partners from Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Scotland and Poland). I was a representative of Pixelache in the network.

From the organisers description:
“‘Rites and Terrabytes’ refers to the peculiar situation where we increasingly feel or desire a connection with rituals and practices of old despite living in a profoundly mediated ‘post-contemporary’ world. In other words, to reconcile the imagined universes of archaic rites and the ubiquitous terabytes of digital information, we need some firm rooting and grounding (terra), whether in our surviving local indigenous culture or in some newly engineered indignity.”

Sylvan Skinship is an exploration to the life of trees and interdependence, it’s an unconference in between trees and humans. It leads the human participants into empathic, interspecies communication with the forest and also into compassionate relation with each others. The session questions what the forest means as a resource and introduces the trees with an agency. In times of much needed resilience, the humans can be supported by the trees in a way that combines the contemporary and the past animistic practices. In Sylvan Skinship, the participants also learn plant medicine and experiment healing with them in steam bath; pirtis or sauna.