GIRIA reflects on the erosion of cultural memory and the search for a new authenticity between tradition and modernity.
The project considers the forest as a cultural, sensory, and material resource that has shaped identity, domestic aesthetics, and vernacular making traditions. Within it lies a personal nostalgia for early 20th-century rural culture – its handmade domestic life, ornamentation, and closeness to nature. Rather than reconstructing the past, GIRIA responds to the awareness of its gradual disappearance, particularly visible in the decline of decorative crafts.
As speed, synthetic materials, and consumer culture distance us from material, craft, and nature, GIRIA returns to self-made practices, slow processes, and individual craftsmanship. At the same time, it questions superficial approaches to contemporary ethno-design that reduce folklore to decorative imitation.
At the centre of the project is an organic, ceramic-like biocomposite developed from tree bark, a wood-industry waste material. Shaped by hand, it retains unpredictability, tactility, and natural deformation. The forms draw from Lithuanian cross-crafting traditions, particularly shrine poles, translating their verticality, structure, and decorative language into a contemporary context.
GIRIA asks what can still be created from fragments of cultural memory – not by reproducing the past, but by using tradition as a foundation for new relationships with material, making, and our environment.
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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
