– Matthew Blunderfield and Jonas Žukauskas

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now:

When we think about public space, we tend to consider the street, the plaza, the park or the square – urban spaces for people to engage in civic life. In this episode Jonas Žukauskas discusses his consideration of the forest as a space of social engagement, in relation to the project ‘Forest Parts.’ 

Initiated in 2019 in collaboration with Jurga Daubaraitė, Forest Parts is ongoing project that, as Žukauskas and Daubaraitė explain, ‘offers to perceive the forest as an infrastructure formed by civic consensus. The unique cultural landscape of the Curonian Spit and the forestation process initiated in the nineteenth century serve as a case study of forest management works in this complex space to interrelate a series of ecological, recreational, representational, and industrial narratives.’

In this episode Žukauskas discusses architecture as a cultural practice, which, in the case of the Forest Parts project, is deemed capable of ‘enhancing the optics through which society senses a forest.’ He also expands on the novel forms of drawing and representation deployed to bring the public to a more intimate understanding of the forest itself.