The Druzhba project (2003-ongoing) is part of the exhibition “Borders are nocturnal animals / Les Frontières sont des animaux nocturnes / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai”, curated by Neringa Bumblienė and Émilie Villez and presented at KADIST and Palais de Tokyo in Paris as part of the Season of Lithuania in France 2024.



The Druzhba, that means “friendship” in Russian, is an installation that embodies research-based cc, stretching 4,000 kilometres from Siberia, through the Baltic States, into Eastern and Central Europe. The version of the work at Palais de Tokyo is narrated in a form of a diary dispersed throughout the installation. The project’s psycho-geographic readings reveal mechanisms of power, colonisation and submission that rightfully belong to the past but still persist today revealing a complex net of invisible energy and thus other dependencies hidden beneath the earth and under false promises of friendship. The pipeline is known from the images of the maps that show its branching, from media reports celebrating its new instalments, its proposed expansions, its refinery openings and closings, the pumping stations, and settlements of the oil industries. The installation highlights the flows and energies produced by a disintegrating colonial infrastructure. It links the distorted and pressurised story of the Druzhba pipeline to the psyche of the decaying empire, that until today is struggling to bridge the past with the present.

Installation. High-performance plastic, UV print, Film archival footage transfer to video (Division of Image and Sound Documents at the Lithuanian Central State Archive)
Architecture in collaboration with Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas (2016)
Graphic design in collaboration with Gaile Pranckūnaitė and Marek Voida (2018)









