Lithuania was the first republic to become independent from the Soviet Union, the transition was radical, every Soviet symbol disappeared, the factories closed, the Russian language stopped being used. After little more than 25 years of independence, this small republic has taken a 180º turn, today a member of the European Union.
The Lithuanian reality, regarding Soviet events, is very sensitive, after suffering a genocide and currently living in constant tension for its neighbor Russia, everything that is linked to the Russian or Soviet is viewed with suspicion and fear in equal parts. Non-Lithuanian ethnic citizens, product of those times of great migrations between Soviet republics, have become an almost invisible collective, even as full citizens, they are really perceived as second class.
Archipelagos tell the story of the Naujoji Vilnia neighborhood, located east of Vilnius, it is an oasis of coexistence, there Russian, Lithuanian, Belarusian or Polish ethnic groups live in harmony, there is a Russian school, Orthodox churches, Cyrillic products and mixed couples. A priori it seems like an integration model but the deeper you go into it the more ghetto it seems.
Because if archipelagos are characterized as something, it is to be united at a distance. They are a whole bound by water, like these cells nursed and separated by a common factor: Russian.
Ire Lenes (1981) is a documentary photographer from Madrid, where she lives and works. She has a Master's degree in International Relations in the Diplomatic School of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain (2008) and a Bachelor's degree in Sociology in the Complutense University of Madrid (2005), and specialization in Human Ecology. She initiated studies of photography on her own until entering the International School of Alcobendas PhotoEspaña PIC.A from 2013 to 2020, where she gained the Certificate in Advanced Study in Documentary Photography, Contemporary Landscape Photography and in Video Capture and Editing.
In 2017 she obtained the PhotoEspaña scholarship to study the Master's Degree in photography "Theories and artistic projects". Ire Lenes attented workshops and seminars of Antoine D’ Agata, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roger Ballen, Eugenio Recuenco and Joan Fontcuberta.
Ire lenes has won several awards such as Ciudad de Alcalá, the DKV scholarship at the Photography and Journalism Seminar in Albarracín, lX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris or Julia Margaret Cameron among others. She has been selected to participate in festivals such as PhotoEspaña or Transeuropa Discovery Week. Her work Archipelagos has been exposed as a solo exhibition in several galleries in Spain and has been published in book format within the Kursala collection of Cádiz, which was recently exhibited at the ¡Hola! event in Taipei, Taiwan.
Currently her work is part of various public and private collections and she has given talks at PiC.A PhotoEspaña, Real Sociedad Fotográfica of Madrid and at the Infotografos conference in Alicante.
In 2017, her personal connection with Lithuania led her to embark on a long-term project, the analysis of ethnic minorities in the Baltic States and the understanding of the particular situation in each country, a trilogy approached from a sociological perspective and materialized through visual narrative.