E12 Julijonas Urbonas

On this Open Studio episode, we are talking to Julijonas Urbonas, the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, which currently presents its project Planet of People at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. 

Julijonas is an artist, designer, researcher, engineer, lecturer. He is the former Pro-Rector of arts at Vilnius Academy of Arts and the CEO of an amusement park in Klaipeda. For more than a decade, he has been working between critical design, amusement park engineering, performative architecture, choreography, kinetic art and sci-fi and has been developing various critical tools for negotiating gravity: from a killer roller coaster to an artificial planet made entirely of human bodies. As part of his research, he has coined the term  ‘gravitational aesthetics’, which involves manipulating gravity to create experiences that push the body and imagination to the extreme.