Czech Republic
Ruta Putramentaite
Ruta Putramentaite is from Vilnius, Lithuania and is based in Prague, Czechia. She received her bachelor’s in Photography from Middlesex University (UK) and another bachelor’s in Sculpture from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (CZ), where she is now pursuing her master’s in Fine Arts.
Putramentaite works across sculpture, writing, audio and performance. For the exploration of the space in-between the personal and the collective, she combines various formal and conceptual elements – her body or her voice, bits of scientific knowledge, fragments of literary works, speculative and imaginary narratives. Her work is informed by a feminist new materialist approach and ponders what it means to be a human in the 21st century, trapped in between accelerated techno-science and accelerated climate crisis.
Her works have been exhibited mostly in Czechia, at the likes of Kabinet t, Plato, Cursor, Meetfactory, Display, Václav Ĺ pála gallery, 4+4 Days In Motion, Entrance, Atrium na Ĺ˝iĹľkovÄ›, Gallery 35m2 and JelenĂ. Together with Denisa Langrová and Jonáš Richter, she is part of the nomadic Choir of Cooperative of Life (sbor druĹľstva Ĺľivot). She is also a co-curator of a festival of Divoká Šárka in the nature reserve of the same name in Prague as well as the co-curator of the symposium More-Than-Human Curiousness with Les- Woods, community for Art, Cultivation and Theory, convened in the OrlickĂ© Mountains in Czechia.
portfolio: rutpu.tumblr.com
symposium: https://les-woods.net/en
divoka sarka festival: https://sarkadivoka.tumblr.com
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In my sculptural installations, formally, I use 2 types of elements:Â
One part consists of industrially produced mass-commodities, which were disposed of and were recycled by me for this installation. Pieces of garbage interest me. Even if materials used for their production originally come from a natural landscape, after they are manufactured by us, these objects do not desintegrate easily into the same landscape. Some, for example, plastic, will take up to thousand years to do so. When I am thinking about this time frame, I imagine the world which neither we, nor many generations after us will see, but these objects will be the ones to witness it.Â
The other type of elements consists of materials, that are made by me and easily decompose, such as paper mache, soil, kombucha leather, bioplastic, bones. I grow these materials on garbage in a way, which reminds me of unseen types of flora. This flora uses the garbage as architecture for building their own living spaces. It thrives in these once-human-made structures.Â
Together, these two types of elements form an intertwined living organism, that is brought for us to see from my imagined future world.
Aspects that are important for me of this work are:Â
*different time scales- human lifetime comparred to geological time,Â
*natural/cultural landscape, both kinds intertwined,Â
*de-centring of the human perspective and bringing perspectives of non-human into imagination.
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