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Pelkė
2025 – Digital 4K – 6:30 min, loop (1 Channel Video Installation)
Kintai Arts Residency
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Statement
In Pelkė, Vincent Jondeau undertakes a poetic investigation of the Aukštumala site in Lithuania, one of Europe’s largest peat bogs. These fragile ecosystems play a crucial role in biodiversity conservation and the regulation of the greenhouse effect, yet they have been profoundly transformed by human activities over the past century, particularly through drainage and peat extraction.
Combining text and image, Pelkė unfolds on two levels: a speculative narrative voice recounts a drifting journey from a restored area to an active extraction site, while the visual layer blends documentary and poetic images, projected onto a clump of soil taken directly from the bog. This fragment becomes a living trace in which the memory of the soil is utopically preserved.
The video installation reveals the paradox of a landscape that is simultaneously protected and exploited, sanctified and scarred by human hands.
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Pelkė
On a cloudy afternoon, I visited Aukštumala peat bog in Lithuania. A restored area was open to visitors. I followed a marked trail toward its marshy edge. Ferns grew in abundance. It reminds me a time before flowering plants, a time before us. The air was humid, and mosquitoes fed eagerly on my skin. Birch trunks stood like silent watchers.
Beyond a barrier of reeds and cranberry shrubs, the landscape I had come for appeared: vast, still, almost unreal. A deep calm settled in. A few birds sang in the distance, perhaps woodlarks or snipes. Save for that, only the wind moved across the bog’s open space.
I saw mosses in pale greens and rust-reds, tiny carnivorous Drosera with brilliant red traps, bog rosemary with bell-shaped flower, ghostly blue lichens. Sparse conifers lined the lakeside. Shimmering blue dragonflies hovered above the water. Frail trees stood alone in the vast, open field. And tiny lizards darting across the wooden path.
Information boards told the story of peat extraction in this area: German settlers in the 19th century, Soviet continuation, slow decline in the 21st.
Curious, I stepped off the path. The soil bounced under my feet. I didn’t go far, remembering the story of four American soldiers swallowed whole by a bog near the border with Belarus.
From the observation tower, I noticed something: dark mounds on the horizon. A quick check on a satellite view revealed a color boundary between the restored zone and another area twice its size, lined with scars. Extraction was still happening.
I left the marked trail to investigate. Along an asphalt road, I found a dusty path with no signs. As the clouds cleared, the sun pressed down. At a bend, a new landscape appeared: ponds and deep brown soil. Drainage ditches cut through the land like moats. Tufts of deergrass clung to the edges, the last survivors.
Farther on, I reached the mounds themselves, rows of peat dunes neatly arranged. It felt like landing on another planet, a biotope drained of life. I circled the site’s perimeter. At its center, hidden from the road, excavators worked steadily while trucks hauled the peat away.
I reached the site’s official entrance. A watchtower stood there, rigid and menacing. I didn’t stop and kept walking. Slowly, the ponds disappeared and gave way to dry, flat earth.
Tire tracks multiplied across the barren ground. On the horizon, a strange shape appeared, like a giant centipede.
A line of stacked peat blocks, waiting to become commodities. The carbon they once stored had long been released into the air.
In a gesture bordering on absurdity, I extracted a piece of soil and put it in my pocket, hoping to preserve the memory of this ground.
Back on the road, I walked to close the loop. Exhausted, the image of a peat mound stayed with me. The fate of our greenhouse Earth?
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12.2025 | IOpener (Quedlinburg/DE) • Group exhibition “Human-Nature in Times of Loneliness”
10.2025 | KUFA – Kulturosfabrikas (Klaipeda/LT) • Group exhibition “Landscape Formations”
08.2025 | Kintai Arts Gallery (Kintai/LT) • Group exhibition “Landscape Formations”
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I-Opener, Quedlinburg
« Human Nature in Time of Loneliness »
« This exhibition was developed in a time not marked by a lack of communication, but by its excess. We inhabit systems that transmit constantly signals, data, images, yet rarely respond. In the context of ecological disruption, collective fatigue, and information saturation, loneliness emerges not only as a personal feeling, but as a condition embedded in the structures through which we live and relate. »
Loneliness is often framed as absence. Solitude, as choice. But sometimes these are not so distinct. Sometimes it is simply speaking in a language no one hears back. In Azerbaijani, tenhaliq carries both solitude and isolation. In German, Einsamkeit shares its root with einzeln, to be singular. To be alone is not always to be apart.
The works in this exhibition hold space for that ambiguity. Some trace environmental degradation not through spectacle, but through slow erosion. Others observe microbial systems or planetary cycles that continue regardless of whether we see them. Some attempt to reach what is lost — voices, signals. These works are built around sustained observation, patience, and the practice of staying. They do not propose nature as a cure, nor treat loneliness as failure. They treat loneliness as consequence, method, and a condition for attention, for recalibrating how we relate to our environment across scales and time.
« To be alone is not always to be disassociated from others or from our ecosystem. Sometimes it is to continue listening, long after the transmission has ended.
Is loneliness today a personal feeling, or a sctructural byproduct of institutional, technological, and economic design?
What forms of attention are still possible under regimes of hyper-visibility and digital exhaustion? »
Curated by Zuleykha Ibad
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Kintai Arts Gallery
« Landscape Formations »
The “Landscape Formations” residency program invited its participants to “sit” with the Pamarys region, to look at it deeper than merely as a territory or an image. Artists engaged with the natural and cultural textures of the Pomeranian coast, reimagining how landscapes can be represented, deconstructed, and reassembled through contemporary visual art. The gaze upon the landscape operates like a kaleidoscope, revealing its multiplicity through personal prisms that explore its various facets.
The term formation (Latin: formatio) signifies the act of shaping or creating. Its primary connotation pertains to the geological processes through which rocks are structured under specific tectonic and climatic conditions over prolonged periods. Viewing the landscape through the lens of formation allows for an exploration of the plein-air motif as a foundational concept while transcending its superficial representation. In essence, it involves beginning with the earth’s structural constructs when depicting a landscape and, perhaps, revealing those constructs to the viewer.
