LTMKS members Augustina Lavickait\u0117 and Ieva Kotryna Ski conclude their month-long Flusso residency with a joint exhibition titled \u201cWhat Remains in the Pockets \/ Conditions of Visibility\u201d, presented across various locations in the town of Putignano, Puglia, Italy, from 24 to 31 October 2026. The exhibition is curated by Denisas Kolomyckis.<\/p>\n
LTMKS members Augustina Lavickait\u0117 and Ieva Kotryna Ski conclude their month-long Flusso residency with a joint exhibition titled \u201cWhat Remains in the Pockets \/ Conditions of Visibility\u201d, presented across various locations in the town of Putignano, Puglia, Italy, from 24 to 31 October 2026. The exhibition is curated by Denisas Kolomyckis.<\/p>\n
Every place exists not only as physical space but also as a constellation of images, narratives and interpretations. Its history is shaped by what happened there and also by what was noticed, recorded, preserved or judged worth remembering. Apulia makes this plain. Contemporary urban life sits directly on archaeological layers that reach back thousands of years, and the ground beneath the town is as full of stories as its streets. Karst landscapes, underground cavities and Neolithic sites belong to the region\u2019s geology and also to its memory, its myths and its everyday imagination.<\/p>\n
What Remains in Pockets \/ Conditions of Visibility <\/em>grows out of this setting. The exhibition brings together Lithuanian artists Augustina Lavickait\u0117 and Ieva Kotryna Ski, who spent nearly a month in residency with Flusso Project in Putignano. As curator, I invited them to treat the town as a field of research and not only as a place to exhibit. Their practices differ in method and material. One works through archives, institutional narratives and the politics of the image. The other works through geological time, family history and the speculative afterlife of ordinary objects. What connects them is an attention to traces, to what is kept, lost, hidden or revealed, and to the conditions that decide which of these we ever get to see.<\/p>\n The curatorial decision at the centre of the project was to leave the gallery behind. The works are distributed across familiar places in Putignano\u2019s historic centre: a public noticeboard, a local bar called Bar Holiday, a commercial space and Bar Italia, one of the best-known and best-loved meeting places in town. A gallery confirms the value of what it shows before we have looked. The streets, bars and notice boards of a small Italian town offer no such confirmation. Here the works must share space with announcements, conversations and daily routines, and some will go unnoticed. That risk is part of the proposition. It makes visible the frame that normally stays invisible, the set of expectations that tells us an object is art. The choice of Bar Italia as the opening venue follows the same logic. For generations it was more than a caf\u00e9 and gelateria. Known for its artisanal gelato, coffee granita and welcoming atmosphere, it was a place where friendships formed, conversations unfolded and small daily rituals became part of the town\u2019s collective memory. The establishment is currently closed. It reopened its doors temporarily for the opening, ahead of its anticipated full return. For a short period contemporary art inhabits the space, so the exhibition holds a glimpse of the bar\u2019s future alongside the memories that shaped its past. A caf\u00e9 is also a place where traces of everyday life accumulate, much as objects and fragments gather in a pocket, which links the venue directly to Ieva Kotryna Ski\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Kotryna\u2019s installation begins with the pocket, a small, almost imperceptible cavity of everyday life where coins, receipts and notes can stay longer than intended until they are forgotten. A piece of paper that goes through the wash loses its writing and its shape, yet it does not disappear. It becomes unrecognisable matter, a kind of archaeological find from daily life, evidence of an event whose circumstances can only be reconstructed. In her practice such material transformations open a way of thinking about the relationships between humans, their environment and time, and about the boundaries between nature and culture, documentation and fiction. During the residency she extended the pocket to the karst landscapes of Apulia, where it becomes a counterpart to the sinkhole, another space in which something can disappear, stay hidden, accumulate or suddenly resurface. Such cavities exist in the ground, in the cracks of a street, in the corners of buildings and in human memory, and each is a temporary repository for the material and immaterial traces of our existence.<\/p>\n Her material combines photographs from the family archive, which carry the geological research of her grandfather Vytautas Narbutas, with images taken on a phone during the residency. The old documents hold an earlier act of reading the landscape, which the artist continues, and they connect the karst of Lithuania with that of southern Italy. The new images, with their low resolution and accidental composition, give up the claim to objective documentation and become fragmentary, subjective observation. Photography, video and a sculptural assemblage of a plastic box, construction debris and stones come together in the installation. The object resembles the remains of an excavation but belongs to the present, and its value comes from a shift of context and not from historical distance. What would ordinarily count as waste becomes a possible source of information, memory or imagination, and once debris and rock are mixed they are hard to tell apart. The artist proposes an alternative archaeology in which the forgotten objects of today become the historical artefacts of tomorrow. The Panther, an almost mythical figure wandering the streets of the town, runs through these layers. Its presence is sensed rather than confirmed. It belongs neither to documentary reality nor to pure fiction, and it lets us see the town as a space of overlapping stories, losses and discoveries. It also reminds us that our relationship to our surroundings is shaped by intuition and myth as much as by evidence. The result is an open-ended investigation in which fragments need not keep their original meaning to tell us something, since a new narrative can begin precisely in loss, deformation or illegibility.<\/p>\n Augustina Lavickait\u0117 approaches the same ground from the direction of authority and evidence. Sometimes a single image becomes the starting point for a historical narrative, even though its meaning depends on the circumstances in which it was made and on those who later interpret it. Every attempt to show something also decides what stays outside the frame. In earlier work she examined how mythologies, political circumstances, infrastructure and institutional mechanisms shape the identity of places and decide which histories acquire value. During the residency she turned to Grotta Scaloria, an important Neolithic archaeological site near Manfredonia. Its discovery is told in overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts. In one, it is linked to Second World War aerial photographs of the Tavoliere plain, which revealed circular traces around previously unexplored Neolithic settlements enclosed by ditches, whose inhabitants probably also visited the cave. Conversations with archaeologists tell another story. The cave was already known in the 1930s during infrastructure works by Acquedotto Pugliese and was later rediscovered by local children, for whom its chambers became a place for games and tests of courage. According to these accounts, they brought back fragments of Neolithic pottery without knowing their archaeological value. The ritual vessels left in the cave were stolen by tombaroli<\/em> before 1975, as the archaeological literature on the site records. Does discovery happen when a place is first noticed, when it is documented, or when a scientific institution recognises its significance? Who decides which moment counts as the beginning of its official history?<\/p>\n Lavickait\u0117 answers with restrained interventions across the town. On the public noticeboard, normally used for temporary announcements and everyday advertisements, she shows an altered archival image of Manfredonia. The image is distorted and stripped of its original clarity, so it resists easy identification and exposes the gap between documentation and knowledge. The noticeboard becomes a provisional repository for a historical image, and even there its significance is not assured. A passer-by may notice it, mistake it for an advertisement or ignore it, so its status depends on the gaze that decides to pay attention. In Bar Holiday she presents a moving-image work made of fragments of caves visited during the residency, which keep surfacing like ghosts of Grotta Scaloria. A bar is a space of everyday rituals and brief stops, and footage of the underground world interrupts that rhythm with a small opening onto another understanding of time and space. The familiar, sociable room and the geological cavities on screen meet in one setting, each with its own relation to the unknown. The work is shown only at certain times of day, which complicates the usual accessibility of an artwork. A visitor might enter the bar without seeing it, or meet the images without realising they are art. The same tension runs through an object made from stiffened agricultural film and warning tape. These materials belong to temporary coverings, protection and the marking of areas, and they recall the protective structures around archaeological sites such as Grotta Scaloria. Moved into another setting, they raise the question of what it means to protect, cordon off or make something visible. Warning tape signals that a space is significant or inaccessible, and agricultural film can conceal something and draw attention to it through its presence.<\/p>\n Seen together, the two bodies of work share a way of handling images and objects of uncertain status, such as family photographs and phone snapshots, distorted archival pictures and fleeting footage of caves. Both artists use modest materials that are ordinarily seen as worthless or merely functional, and both place their work where it might not be noticed. They differ in where they start. Ski begins with the intimate and the geological, and Lavickait\u0117 with the institutional and the evidentiary. Between these two entry points the exhibition proposes the town as a collaborator and not a neutral container. The works blend into its visual noise or briefly disturb its rhythm, and in that uncertainty there is room to ask how we come to see some objects as artworks and others as insignificant details of daily life. What matters most is not what is shown but the conditions under which we begin to see at all. Beneath the surface of everyday urban life lie histories we do not yet know, and among familiar advertisements, shop windows and notices there may be images to which we have not yet given meaning. Like underground caves, they do not cease to exist because we cannot see them. Discovering them depends on our willingness to look where we do not usually look.<\/p>\n Augustina Lavickait\u0117 is a visual researcher and artist working across image, sound and text to explore how memory, witnessing and collective narratives are embedded in objects and landscapes. Archiving is central to her practice, both as a research method and as an artistic form, through which she collects, reinterprets and assembles found and newly produced materials into layered narratives. Her work has been presented internationally at Art Rotterdam, Salone del Mobile, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and Dutch Design Week. In 2024 she received the Young Designer Award from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and in 2026 she took part in the ARCUS Project residency in Moriya, Japan. She collaborates with cultural institutions including Nieuwe Instituut (NL) and has received support from Creative Industries Fund NL, Nordic Culture Point (FI) and Cultuurfonds (NL).<\/p>\n Ieva Kotryna Ski is a Lithuanian artist based in Paris whose multidisciplinary practice spans documentary film, text and audiovisual installation. Her work explores the intersections of visual storytelling, documentary approaches and experimental artistic forms, and investigates how narratives are constructed, represented and experienced. Recent projects include the solo exhibition stonewashing at Editorial project space in Vilnius (2025) and the Preila Project installation at Pamario Gallery in Juodkrant\u0117. Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at Fondation Fiminco in Paris (2024), Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (2022) and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius (2021), among others.<\/p>\n Denisas Kolomyckis is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and Artistic Director of Flusso. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. His practice spans performance, sculpture and visual arts, and explores identity, collective memory and social structures. His work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Serpentine Gallery in London and Microscope Gallery in New York. His curatorial approach focuses on site-specific artistic research, interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue between artists and local communities.<\/p>\n Exhibition is on view in Putignano, Apulia, until 31 October 2026.<\/p>\n Photography: Augustina Lavickait\u0117<\/p>\n \n\t\t