This Thursday at Luna6 we will have a visitor Evelina Šimkutė who has been cultivating communal gardening in Kaunas – Šilainiai urban gardens. Evelina will introduce the gardens and open a conversation about community organizing. Naujininkai Commons will also share some thoughts on how they’ve been thinking about gardening as a strategy for ‘commoning’ enclosed, commercialized and uninhabitable urban terrains and relations.

The talk will be accompanied by a meal made from some district pumpkins.

More about Šilainiai Urban Gardens:

https://www.facebook.com/silainiusodai/
https://silainiaiproject.com

Šilainiai is the biggest housing estate in the city of Kaunas, dominated by apartment buildings and is home to 50 thousand people. However, there is a noticeable lack of public spaces and services, the only non-commercial local community gathering space being a public library. To this end, Šilainiai project has been developed as a creative platform in Šilainiai that focuses on active engagement with the site and local community through a variety of creative processes, such as talks, artistic events, archiving, and others.

In 2018, a vision for Šilainiai gardens was started at the Kaunas 8th Fortress. The gardens have become equipped with shared soil beds, and also have been a place for urban furniture workshops, peer-led events on beekeeping, a biodiversity project for saving the natural habitat for insects and birds, and other various communal events.

Check out this very informative information sheet about the vision for Šilainiai gardens:
https://evelinasimkutedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/ŠILAINIŲ-SODAI-Vision-_20181201_English.pdf