Biography

Indrė Umbrasaitė is a Lithuanian-born architect active in academia and practice, working on projects that embrace architecture in communication with art, design and curatorship. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of Architecture and Landscape and a doctoral candidate at Graz University of Technology, Austria. Indrė is a member of MIT’s Climate Visions Lab, co-founder of the research collaboration Studio SOL, co-editor of 'Positions: Unfolding Architectural Endeavours’ (Birkhäuser 2020) and 'Island City Village River' (IoA 2019). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Swamp School at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 and Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe 2020-2021.

Project: On Winterness

This project, rooted in architectonic thinking, explores the spaces and techniques by which people throughout the ages have lived with and within a 'non-productive' landscape. It stems from an ongoing investigation on the fading season of winter – a dark and quite time of suspended metabolism – presenting the case for a non-extractivist relation with nature. Inherent to any environment (like swamp, island, city, village, river; coast, land and the sea), winter as a climatic model motivates new imaginaries for an emerging togetherness in a world destabilised by ecological, political and social change.