19 - 21 march

Vilnius

Circular Design Symposium: ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’

This March, the symposium What Goes Around Comes Around will unfold in Vilnius as a three-day constellation of a conference and an art programme. Bringing critical discourse in urbanism and architecture into dialogue with artistic work, the symposium approaches circular design not merely as a strategy of material reuse, but as a profound way of rethinking value, labour, energy, and continuity across time

Organised by Architektūros fondas

Location: National Gallery of Art, Vilnius

All symposium events are free, but some require registration

All information and registration here

Programme

  • 13:30 / Workshop and discussion 
    How Continuous Education Can Enable Circular Construction

    19:00 / Performative walking tour 
    Hello Darkness(es)
    Start: Vitebsko St. 23, Vilnius

    The tour will be led by interdisciplinary spatial practitioner and researcher Pablo Encinas Alonso.

  • 9:30 / Arrivals

    10:00 / Opening Keynote
    Baukultur and the emerging culture of a social and ecological transition

    Speaker: Italian architect and urbanist Paola Viganò.

    11:10 / Coffee break

    11:30 / Session 1
    Planning for Long-Term Transformation

    Speakers and panelists:
    Nicholas Duxbury Ransome – Managing Director at Lendager: a circular architecture firm based in Copenhagen;
    Kristiaan Borret – quality supervisor of urban transformation areas in the City of Amsterdam and professor of urban design at Ghent University, former Chief Architect (Bouwmeester) of the Brussels-Capital Region; Kateryna Lopatiuk – Ukrainian architect and spatial researcher living and working in Paris.

    Moderator: Paulius Kliučininkas.

    13:00 / Lunch break

    14:30 / Session 2
    Matters of Time

    Speakers and panelists:
    Fabian Lauener – Architect at TEN studio, a hybrid architecture studio based in Zurich and Belgrade;
    Alice Babini – Architect at Babini Geysen Architects, whose practice focuses on building transformation, circular design, and material reuse;
    Jakob Rabe – Architect at Pihlmann Architects;
    Varvara Yagnysheva – Researcher and architect at CO-HATY, contributing to the restoration and reconstruction of housing in Ukraine.

    Moderator: Martynas Germanavičius.

    16:30 / Coffee break

    17:00 / Closing Keynote

    Speaker: Artistic and Managing Director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) Saskia van Stein.

  • National Gallery of Art, Konstitucijos Av. 22, Vilnius
    Exhibition open: 20 March – 19 April

    18:30 / Exhibition Opening

    19:00 / Performance by Eglė Šimėnaitė
    The performance will take place in the installation by Lucille Leger, Jacques-Marie Ligot, Diāna Mikāne, and Paula Veidenbauma – European architecture platform LINA Fellows.

  • 14:00 / Collective walking tour
    Following the Wolf’s Footsteps
    Start: Vilkpėdės St. 24, Vilnius (car parking lot)

    Tour will be led by the interdisciplinary artist Kipras Dubauskas.

    17:30 / Tour of the exhibition Invisible Labour
    National Gallery of Art, Vilnius

    Tour will be led by the exhibition curator Martynas Germanavičius.

    19:00 / Performative walking tour
    Hello Darkness(es)
    Start: Vitebsko St. 23, Vilnius

    The tour will be led by interdisciplinary spatial practitioner and researcher Pablo Encinas Alonso.

CONFERENCE BUILDING WITH TIME

Location: National Gallery of Art, Vilnius

Contemporary architecture increasingly operates within the realities of investment-driven development and rapidly evolving lifestyles. In this context, the capacity to transform the built environment has become essential. Yet transformation itself can take very different forms, from careful maintenance and adaptive reuse to partial alteration or complete rebuilding.

The conference invites urbanists, architects, researchers, and cultural practitioners to reflect on architecture as a temporal practice that negotiates inherited conditions, present urgencies, and futures that extend beyond them. Through lectures, conversations, and case studies, the conference will explore practices that foreground time as a foundational concern of design, work with existing structures, cultivate regenerative approaches, and seek to repair relationships between architecture, territory, and society.

Speakers at the conference include Saskia van Stein, Paola Viganò, Kristiaan Borret, Nicholas Duxbury Ransome (Lendager), Kateryna Lopatiuk, Alice Babini (Babini Geysen Architects), Fabian Lauener (TEN Studio), Varvara Yagnysheva and Jakob Rabe (pihlmann architects).

ART PROGRAMME INVISIBLE LABOUR

National Gallery of Art and other venues across the city

Expanding the symposium’s enquiries, the art programme Invisible Labour examines the technological and societal transformations rooted in the infrastructures and networks that sustain our everyday lives. It reflects on energy as an invisible yet measurable force and highlights the often-unnoticed material and social infrastructures that keep our systems functioning.

Invisible Labour brings urgent themes of social invisibility of cleaning, maintenance, and care work amidst climate change, geopolitical tensions, and the rise of digital automation into the Lithuanian art field. Combining a performative programme and an exhibition, it invites critical reflection and aesthetic experience regarding what fundamentally sustains our life together.

Artists: Beatričė Mockevičiūtė-Narbutienė, Deimantas Narkevičius, Emilija Povilanskaitė, Mindaugas Reklaitis, Pablo Alonso Encinas, Kipras Dubauskas, Justinas Dūdėnas, Lucille Leger, Jacques-Marie Ligot, Diāna Mikāne and Paula Veidenbauma.