Previous residencies

So far in 2025, the Panemunė Castle Artists’ Residency has hosted and collaborated with professional and emerging artists:

Students from the Painting Department of the Kaunas Faculty and Department of Graphic Arts and the Vilnius Faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. They resided at the Creative Workshops for three weeks, during which they honed their skills and created new works for the upcoming exhibition.

Students from the Painting Department of the Vilnius Faculty of Vilnius Academy of Arts. They resided at the Creative Workshops for three weeks, during which they honed their skills.

Students from various European countries participated in the International Architecture Summer School organized by the Kaunas Faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, which took place in Kaunas and at Panemunė Castle. Six groups explored three different problem areas in and around Panemunė Castle.

This summer, the Vilnius Academy of Arts hosted two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Emmanuela Ilok (from Nigeria) and Yutian He (from Singapore). The students are undertaking a two-week internship at Panemunė Castle in collaboration with the New European Bauhaus (NEB) Research Hub, participating in educational activities and exploring topics related to architecture, design, and heritage. You can find Yutian’s impressions here.

The Lithuanian Summer Manor School has been organized for five years and returns to Panemunė Castle each year. The event aims to familiarize participants with manor culture, history, and the nuances of heritage preservation. The impressions of the time in the castle can be found here.

HEMA – the Historical European Martial Arts camp – took place at Panemunė Castle in July, featuring lectures, training sessions, and duels. Over 40 participants improved their skills in various historical martial arts disciplines.

Art Therapy and Yoga Camp ‘Rediscover the Joy of Life’ took place in Panemunė Castle grounds.

Baltic Manors Summer School – The International Manor Culture School, which included lecturers and participants from Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Latvia, and Lithuania. The impressions can be found here: Ist day , 2nd day, 3rd day, 4th day, 5th day, 6th day.

Adult Painting Practice “Oil on Canvas” 2025

Residents of 2024

Mathematician M. Miliauskas and his significant other, architect Emilija, resided in Panemunė Castle from October 7 to November 8, 2024. Their feedback on the time spent in the castle:

“Together with Emilija, we arrived at the artists’ residency at Panemunė Castle for a month in early October. The purpose of the residency was to conduct research on one specific formulation of truth (“truth is the product of two opposing sets of truths”). The plan during this period was to understand existing theories of truth, give myself time and space to understand whether the aforementioned definition is worth anything, and formulate an argument in essay format.

At first, there was a couple of days of getting used to it, because I’m used to thinking about the most important things while walking, so it took me a while to find my “circumnavigation”. But after that, it was just a perfectly productive morning: you drink coffee, climb up to the Vytėnai Chapel, then descend to the grave of Duke Vytenis and his wife, turn around and head towards the Gelgaudai Oak, and finally return to the castle. If you need more time to structure your thoughts, there are many good diversions along the way. You are in silence the whole time, surrounded by nature, the countryside, the castle, and their idyllic harmony. Yes, you start to become a poet.

In the afternoon, my favorite productivity hack was to walk towards the Kartupėnai hillfort. A long straight road with a view of the Nemunas River from above begins from the hillfort. There are no people around, only fields in the distance. Okay, I saw maybe two people during the whole month, one was riding a bike and the other was walking towards a cow. And the hack is that you can go without any pressure to write, but with the sound recording on your phone turned on. If something comes out of silence and boredom, you just dictate it out loud. If no one is shooting at your head, then you don’t shoot, you burn calories, you recharge your batteries.

In fact, reflecting now, I look at this month with white envy. The presence of a specific deadline, isolation from the hustle and bustle of the city and world news. You get tired, you go for a walk around the castle, the village, the mounds, etc. During the time that passed, I wrote several versions of the essay, and finally chose the one whose narrative form was inspired by M. C. Escher’s paradoxical illustrations. I also had some existential crises related to the argumentative strength of the essay as a format. The very fact that I was “seeking the truth” here was also difficult to bear. Such, it seemed, was a puff of hot air. Finally, I decided to create, in addition to the essay, a website for the formation of the truth of statements, based on the aforementioned definition of truth. “What I realized as a result was that I had never even considered that every “truth machine” in our society, whether it’s Wikipedia, or science, or ChatGPT, each of them uses some theory of truth by default to put a “stamp” on the truth before presenting that truth to us.”

Writing practice of master’s students of the Telšiai Faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Lithuanian Manors Summer School’24.