Ieva Butkutė (Lithuania)

Bio

Ieva is a Lithuanian-based architect who graduated in 2021 with an MA degree. Now she is in her 2nd year of doctoral studies in architecture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She rethinks cycles of life and the meaning of waste, and seeks to find non-destructive ways to redesign the environment. Her current research focuses on industrial sites, their materiality, by-products and the phenomenon of industrial areas as huge architectural complexes disconnected from city life.

Project

The inquiry explores architectural sites where industrially useful materials collide with ecologically toxic or seemingly worthless waste, creating striking imbalances. Delving into the site-specific context of eastern Estonia and its oil-shale industry, the project unveils human-made, postnatural landscapes of heroic scale, intertwined with soviet and post-soviet infrastructures and evolving economic dynamics. Ieva’s work highlights the intersection of spaces where the extraction and use of natural resources meet the creation of waste, revealing the complex interdependencies within these environments. During her residency, Ieva will present the project “Altered earthscapes”, featuring a series of maps and video documentation shaped by her personal experiences and collaborations with the local community in Ida-Viru County. As a neutral observer of industrial and landscape architecture, she invites viewers to reconsider their place within these vast systems. Through this lens, she challenges us to perceive ourselves as interconnected entities, existing at multiple scales. To truly understand our role within the global scale, we must first draw closer and examine our immediate surroundings.