URVAS, 2025
room installation
plaster, cement, branches, wood and jute fabric
180 m2, Height 8 m
At Museo de Arte Antonio Paredes Candia, In El Alto , Bolivia

Building shelters is not an exclusively human gesture. Birds weave nests with branches in the treetops; moles dig tunnels with their paws; ants sculpt cathedrals of clay. These acts reveal an instinct shared with the organic, the curved, the body-adapted. In contrast, human architecture—particularly modern architecture—insists on right angles, pure lines, and geometries that demarcate a radical separation from nature. Gintare Sokelyte erases this boundary by transforming the museum into a living cavern.
By dismantling the "white cube" to create an architectural organism, she makes space something experienced with the pores. Her installation at the Antonio Paredes Candia Museum of Art is a habitable cavern: a refuge of sinuous walls, built with materials gathered from diverse contexts. In rejecting straight lines, the artist returns us to an ancestral memory where shelter was an extension of the body, not an imposition upon the land.
Upon entering the cavern, the visitor is confronted with an intimate, multisensory experience: the scent of raw construction materials, the distorted echo of their own footsteps, the rough texture of the walls beneath their fingertips. The installation is not to be looked at—it is to be inhabited. And in that inhabitation, the body remembers that spaces are not neutral: they shape us just as we shape them.
What new worlds become possible when the museum ceases to be a "white cube" and transforms into a temporary refuge? Sokelyte suggests that architecture can be an act of resistance—against homogenization, against the sterility of functionality, against the illusion that everything must be "within sight."
In times of global uncertainty, where the future appears blurred and communities fragmented, Sokelyte’s work evokes a symbolic return to the primordial. Paleolithic caves were the first spaces of coexistence: places where art, ritual, and survival intertwined. The artist does not propose regression, but a critical reinvention. If architecture is an answer to the question how do we live together?, her cavern redefines the terms and invites us to remember other possible ways of dwelling.
This gesture connects her to artists who have used the cave as a critical metaphor. Like the works of Hito Steyerl or Goshka Macuga, there is here a reflection on our turbulent present—but Sokelyte adds a singular layer: where those artists explore the digital or the archival, she reclaims the political power of the tactile. Through this medium, our bodies can recover forgotten memories and, in doing so, invent new paths through the familiar.
Here, the refuge is neither private nor defensive; it is a meeting place where heightened senses allow us to truly recognize the other. The materials speak of interdependence; the curves deny the hierarchy of straight lines and suggest new forms of coexistence. In a hyperconnected yet emotionally isolated world, can the darkness of a cave illuminate new ways of community?
Text by Andrés Gorzycki
Project in collaboration with german artist Jonathan Creutzberg and  bolivian artists -   Itha Cecilia Yujra Maranin, Indira Huallpara Ticona, Ariel Geron Mamani Chambilia, Tony Villano, La Roja ( Mariel Sheriff S.), Simon Carpintero, Eduardo  Villalba, Roberto Arturo Barboza Torrez,  Maximiliano Sinani.

Text by Andrés Gorzycki
Building shelters is not an exclusively human gesture. Birds weave nests with branches in the treetops; moles dig tunnels with their paws; ants sculpt cathedrals of clay. These acts reveal an instinct shared with the organic, the curved, the body-adapted. In contrast, human architecture—particularly modern architecture—insists on right angles, pure lines, and geometries that demarcate a radical separation from nature. Gintare Sokelyte erases this boundary by transforming the museum into a living cavern.
By dismantling the "white cube" to create an architectural organism, she makes space something experienced with the pores. Her installation at the Antonio Paredes Candia Museum of Art is a habitable cavern: a refuge of sinuous walls, built with materials gathered from diverse contexts. In rejecting straight lines, the artist returns us to an ancestral memory where shelter was an extension of the body, not an imposition upon the land.
Upon entering the cavern, the visitor is confronted with an intimate, multisensory experience: the scent of raw construction materials, the distorted echo of their own footsteps, the rough texture of the walls beneath their fingertips. The installation is not to be looked at—it is to be inhabited. And in that inhabitation, the body remembers that spaces are not neutral: they shape us just as we shape them.
What new worlds become possible when the museum ceases to be a "white cube" and transforms into a temporary refuge? Sokelyte suggests that architecture can be an act of resistance—against homogenization, against the sterility of functionality, against the illusion that everything must be "within sight."
In times of global uncertainty, where the future appears blurred and communities fragmented, Sokelyte’s work evokes a symbolic return to the primordial. Paleolithic caves were the first spaces of coexistence: places where art, ritual, and survival intertwined. The artist does not propose regression, but a critical reinvention. If architecture is an answer to the question how do we live together?, her cavern redefines the terms and invites us to remember other possible ways of dwelling.
This gesture connects her to artists who have used the cave as a critical metaphor. Like the works of Hito Steyerl or Goshka Macuga, there is here a reflection on our turbulent present—but Sokelyte adds a singular layer: where those artists explore the digital or the archival, she reclaims the political power of the tactile. Through this medium, our bodies can recover forgotten memories and, in doing so, invent new paths through the familiar.
Here, the refuge is neither private nor defensive; it is a meeting place where heightened senses allow us to truly recognize the other. The materials speak of interdependence; the curves deny the hierarchy of straight lines and suggest new forms of coexistence. In a hyperconnected yet emotionally isolated world, can the darkness of a cave illuminate new ways of community?
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