GIRIA reflects on the erosion of cultural memory and the search for a new authenticity emerging from the tension between tradition and modernity.
The project considers the forest as a multi-layered cultural, sensory, and intellectual resource that has shaped identity, domestic aesthetics, and ways of understanding the world, as well as a material and symbolic foundation for vernacular making practices and decorative traditions. Within this context, a more personal relationship to the past emerges – an indirect nostalgia for early 20th-century rural culture, its handmade domestic life, ornamentation, and close connection to nature. This nostalgia is not about reconstructing the past, but about a sensitive awareness of its absence and disappearance, particularly visible in the decline of decorative crafts.
Today, as speed, synthetic materials, and consumer logic distance us from material, craft, and nature, GIRIA returns to self-made practices, slow processes, and individual craftsmanship, while critically reflecting on the superficial ways contemporary ethno-design engages with folklore, often reducing it to decorative imitation or even kitsch.
The project develops an organic, ceramic-like biocomposite material made from wood industry waste – tree bark – allowing objects to be shaped by hand while preserving the material’s unpredictability, tactility, and natural deformation. The forms draw inspiration from Lithuanian cross-crafting traditions, particularly shrine poles, translating their verticality, structure, and decorative language into a contemporary context.
Here, domesticity becomes a meditative act, and rituals act as carriers of new meaning. The project invites a reconsideration not only of what has been inherited, but also of what can still be created from fragments of memory – not the past itself, but a renewed connection to material, environment, and to what can still emerge from the foundations of fading traditions.
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GIRIA Trophy
2026
GIRIA Bio-composite (tree bark powders, self-made bioplastic), ash wood, reused steel base.
Tree barks are sourced from locally harvested Lithuanian forest.
39cm x 22cm, 1.3kg
Evelina Kudabaite
