ECHO ARCHIVES | International group exhibition at Pamėnkalnio Gallery

Artists: Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė, Akvilė Anglickaitė, Agnė Auželytė, Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren, Aurora Del Rio, Meri Hietala, Mantas Valentukonis, Hanna Wildow.

Echo Archives is a group exhibition that brings together artists from three countries to explore the structures of ecological memory, inherited forms of land-based knowledge, and the fragile relationships that bind people, landscapes, and histories together.

The exhibition begins with a simple question: how do we learn to care for the world around us? Through stories told in kitchens, songs passed between generations, seasonal rituals, and everyday gestures such as tending to a plant or protecting a river, knowledge about living with nature has long been shared through experience rather than instruction. Yet these forms of knowledge are increasingly endangered by extractive economies, environmental degradation, and the accelerated rhythms of contemporary life.

Moving through the exhibition, visitors encounter landscapes that carry multiple and often contradictory histories. Seas, rivers, forests, and territories emerge as living archives that simultaneously hold memories of care and conflict, belonging and exclusion, preservation and exploitation. The works reflect on the shifting relationship between the Baltic and Black Seas, polluted waterways, industrial contamination, and ancient oral traditions, revealing how fragile our notions of distance, safety, and permanence can be. Voices, breaths, and natural environments become intertwined, inviting visitors to practise listening as both an ecological and political act. Together, the artworks ask how future generations might remember the traces we leave behind, from visible transformations of the landscape to invisible dangers buried deep within the earth.

The exhibition proposes that ecological memory is not a nostalgic return to the past, but an active practice of remembering, listening, and caring. It invites us to reconsider what we choose to preserve and what we allow to disappear. As ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, “all flourishing is mutual.” The future emerges through the restoration of fragile relationships among communities, territories, and the more-than-human worlds with which we coexist.

Echo Archives is an attempt to listen to these echoes before they fade: the movement of water, the sound of wind through trees, a bird’s call, a fading story, or a landscape that continues to remember even when we have forgotten.

Organiser: Pamėnkalnio Gallery
Curator: Julija Pociūtė
Co-curators: Ramiro Camelo, Alba Folgado
Graphic Designer: Svajūnė Jedinkutė
Lead Technician: Deividas Valentukonis
Partners: Myymälä2, Köttinspektionen
Financed by: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Artists’ Association