RIVER / UPĖ immersive cut-paper and acrylic installation 2026

RIVER / UPĖ

A river made of memory

RIVER / UPĖ is a suspended, walk-around installation exploring memory, ancestry, continuity, and the passage of time through the metaphor of a river.

The work is built from hand-cut paper imagery suspended across transparent acrylic planes. Figures, roots, trees, water, fish, plants, and elements inspired by Lithuanian ethnographic ornamentation overlap and intersect, creating a layered visual landscape that shifts as the viewer moves around the installation. The transparency of the materials allows individual images to merge, separate, and reappear, suggesting that memory is never fixed, but constantly reconstructed through movement, time, and perspective.

At the heart of the installation is the image of a woman as a tree of life — a figure carrying what came before her while simultaneously extending toward what comes next. Her body becomes a place where personal and collective memory meet: ancestry, cultural identity, motherhood, tradition, and the stories carried from one generation to another.

The river becomes both passage and archive. It carries traces of those who came before us while continuing forward, connecting past, present, and future. Its movement is not only geographical, but emotional and ancestral — a continuous flow of memory that cannot be completely held, yet remains present beneath the surface.

Elements of Lithuanian visual tradition are woven into the installation not as literal representations, but as fragments of cultural memory. They coexist with natural forms — roots, water, fish, plants — creating a visual language in which landscape, body, and heritage become inseparable.

The installation invites the viewer to move around it rather than encounter it from a single fixed perspective. With each change of position, new relationships between the layers emerge. What appears hidden from one angle becomes visible from another.

In this way, RIVER / UPĖ reflects the nature of memory itself: layered, fluid, inherited, and constantly changing — yet always carrying something of where we come from.

Artists: Gabriele Dabasinskaite & Zivile Andrius