Sunken Cities takes us into the ancient Roman city of Baiae; once a place of excess, it now sits entirely underwater, submerged by centuries of volcanic activity. Under the waves, the 2,000-year-old ruins of a hedonistic resort appear: marble corridors, stone hallways, strange scaffolding, and mosaics overgrown with coral slowly flow across the screen, as Škarnulytė transforms the seabed into a reflection on time, memory, and impermanence. As an underwater archaeologist, she drifts silently through a sunken landscape, suspended between past, present, and future at once. In Škarnulytė’s vision, submersion becomes transformation: culture endures in sediment, memory evolves into ecosystems, and human traces merge with broader planetary cycles. Sunken Cities is a visual meditation on the persistence of change. While civilizations may disappear, their traces will continue to resonate through water, stone, and time.

Aphotic Zone investigates the lightless depths of the Pacific seamounts off the coast of Costa Rica, descending more than four kilometers below the ocean surface. Inhabiting a zone where bioluminescent organisms and deep-sea technologies must coexist, the work presents an environment that evokes both distant past and possible future. A remotely operated vehicle with its manipulator arms samples deep-sea corals while images of the seafloor and oil rigs generated with 3D laser-scanner data and a Deep Vision camera contribute to a landscape of prehistoric creatures and advanced technologies. The soundscape combines recordings made in Mexico City during the five hundredth anniversary of the conquest of Tenochtitlán with underwater frequencies, creating an acoustic link between historical and contemporary forms of expansion and control. Aphotic Zone moves between documentary and speculative fiction, approaching marine depths as a space where scientific observation, technological perception, and cultural memory converge. 

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition Penumbra (Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2022).

Filmed inside the vast Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, Burial explores a landscape shaped by the legacies of energy, contamination, and ideology. Once one of the largest nuclear facilities in Europe, Ignalina is now undergoing the slow process of decommissioning—its concrete chambers and cooling pools are gradually being emptied of radioactive matter. Škarnulytė’s camera moves through this irradiated architecture with precision, tracing the remnants of a system that was once the definition of progress, offering the promise of a utopic future. Intertwining the technological and mythical through the presence of an enormous python slowly moving across an abandoned control panel, Burial suggests not a ruin but a perpetual transition, where the cyclical forces of nature persist against the unsettling stillness of the obsolete. 

Filmed in the Brazilian Amazon at the confluence of the Rio Solimões’ milky-white glacials waters and the Rio Negro’s turbid, nutrient-rich black silt, Æqualia follows a post-human figure gliding through six kilometers of merging waters. Viewed from above, the meeting of the two rivers—distinct in temperature, color, and composition—creates a watery boundary that dramatically resists intermingling. Within this threshold zone, Škarnulytė stages a meditation on equilibrium and fragility. Embodying a chimera (half-fish, half-person), the artist swims through this changing waterway as both witness and participant, carefully following the current’s fractal swirls, her gestures attentive to their turbulence and rhythm. Shortly after the work was completed, the region experienced extreme drought and the location where the waters meet ran dry. The pink and grey river dolphins unique to these rivers (the botos) began to die as a result. Æqualia reflects on the river as a living metaphor for interdependence, highlighting an interconnectedness that extends beyond species boundaries while also preserving a moment of extreme vulnerability, balanced between documentary observation and symbolically loaded imagery.

Co-commissioned by the 14th Gwangju Biennale and Canal Projects (New York).

Riparia examines the river as a geographic boundary, a living entity, and an origin of human settlement. Filmed along the length of the Rhône river, a waterway that has been used by humans for millennia, it reflects upon rivers as a driving force in shaping systems of exchange, power, and belief. On-screen, two goddess-like mythical beasts embrace, navigating a vast expanse of water just downstream from a Swiss hydroelectric plant. As the river surges and churns in its wake, the serpents appear hovering above it, transforming the rushing waters into a cosmic cloud. The twin sea-snake creatures allude to the myth of the Gemini, who are not only twins but the keepers of secrets, communications, and most of all, symbolize mutability and change. Slow, meditative shots further connect these figures with the theories of Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921–94), who interpreted Neolithic societies along European rivers as matriarchal and oriented toward the worship of water deities. Such historical and mythological figures are part of the river’s sedimented history as much as the present-day hydroelectric dams, highlighting how human intervention, conflict, and resource extraction have replaced earlier forms of aquatic reverence.

Co-produced with Ferme-Asile (Sion, Switzerland) and Taurus Foundation for Arts and Sciences.

Xirasia explores the relationship between Neolithic ritual sites and contemporary ecological transformation within a landscape shaped by marshes, sediments, and waterways. Following Æqualia and Riparia, it is the third in a trilogy of fluvial films that draw upon the “archaeomythological” theories of Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921–94), specifically the interdisciplinary field of study she developed to understand the beliefs, rituals, and social structures of ancient societies. Filmed at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River in southern Spain, Xirasia approaches the river as a site of transformation. The camera moves through rocky terrain where the traces of ancient worship intersect with the infrastructure of modern agriculture; temples once dedicated to water goddesses now stand beside contemporary irrigation systems and drained wetlands. As a metaphysical force of its own, the river reveals its subjectivity as a carrier of cultural and ecological memory, transformed by the specter of human actions lost to the wash of millennia and shaped by the imprinting forces of mythology, history, and capital upon the landscape.  

Oceanic oxygen levels deplete. Suffocation becomes ubiquitous. Methane bubbles up to the surface of the sea. Hypoxia examines the growing phenomenon of dead zones, where oxygen levels are so depleted that marine life can no longer exist. The Baltic Sea, where this work was filmed, contains some of the world’s largest dead zones due to its nature as an inland sea where water is exchanged very slowly over time. Descending into this environment reveals a seabed shaped by pollution, industrial waste, and the lingering remnants of military infrastructure. Toxins accumulate as the sea absorbs decades of decaying Cold War-era machinery along with methane leaked from pipeline explosions and geopolitical sabotage. With the curious observation of a scientist and rapturous imagination of a poet, Škarnulytė combines images of lifeforms struggling to exist on the ocean floor alongside references to the so-called Baltic Sea Anomaly, a spacecraft that reportedly lies at the bottom of the sea, and the mermaid goddess Jūratė who, in Lithuanian mythology, also lives on the sea’s floor. The boundaries between historical myth, contemporary science, and futurist science fictions all blur in the aquatic vision of a suffocating underwater world.   

The sculptural series If Water Could Weep (Mermaid Tears) reinterprets the Lithuanian myth of Jūratė, a sea goddess who falls in love with a mortal. Her father, a god of thunder, is so enraged that he destroys her underwater palace and kills her lover. When pieces of amber wash up along the shores of the Baltic Sea, it is said to be the tears of the eternally mourning mermaid. From this epic story of loss, Škarnulytė has developed a material meditation on transformation, as each sculpture appears caught somewhere between solid, liquid, or gaseous states. Amber (the translucent, fossilized remains of tree resin that often contains ancient lifeforms within) serves as the conceptual link between myth and material. In Škarnulytė’s reinterpretation, glass becomes its contemporary analogue, transformed through heat and pressure, transparent yet impenetrable. The sculptures seem to breathe light, as if the sea itself had shaped them in the moment of life’s primordial origin. Like the slow hardening of a lava flow or the atmospheric expansion of cosmic dust, they reflect the strangeness and wonder of being witness to a perpetual process of becoming. In these weeping mermaid’s tears, planetary processes collide with oceanic mythologies, transforming emotional experience into physical form.

Two pythons slither and writhe against each other’s entwined bodies in slow movements that seem as erotic as they are threatening. Framed within a sacral, temple-like space, the snakes braid together and transform into a double-helix strand of DNA, morphing from magic sigils into genetic sequence and shapeshifting back again into snake form. Played on loop, these infinite serpents evoke the symbol of the ouroboros, an ancient icon of a molting snake eating its own tail that is found across various cultures and eras. Generally viewed as emblematic of the creative and destructive forces of the cycles of life, it can also be read as a fertility sign—one that breaks down into a genetic mutation only to reform anew. 

Commissioned by Kunsthall Trondheim.

With these drawings, Škarnulytė continues her exploration of geologic time by engaging with minerals as autonomous matter. To produce shimmering, metallic inks, she combines a range of natural materials—ground stone minerals, plankton water, various oils, volcanic sediments, mustard pigments, Canarian sea salt—that transform the act of drawing into a physical record of accumulation, sedimentation, erosion, and flow. On the page, the liquid matter behaves like a living element as it is absorbed, diffused, and shaped by gravity. Each sheet of paper becomes a surface of slow transformation; each mark is deliberate, shaped by the rhythm of breath and a balance between control and release. 

The drawings do not depict fixed entities, but rather trace the unfolding of relations between gesture and gravity, pigment and paper, living matter and solid form. The mineral pigments carry traces of geological formations from various volcanic, oceanic, and coastal sites in St Ives (UK), Tenerife (Spain), Villefranche-sur-Mer (France), and the Izu Peninsula (Japan), reflecting an ongoing engagement with the earth as both subject and medium. The resulting works oscillate between writing and mapping, appearing as surface and depth, body and landscape, microscopic organism and cosmic cloud.