Julijonas Urbonas is an artist, designer, researcher, engineer, founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, associate professor at Vilnius Academy of Arts. Former Director of a Soviet amusement park in Klaipeda.

Working between critical design, amusement park engineering, performative architecture, choreography, kinetic art and sci-fi, he has been developing various critical tools for negotiating gravity: from a killer roller coaster to an artificial asteroid made up entirely of human bodies. In these projects, he coins the term of gravitational aesthetics, an artistic approach exploiting the means of manipulating gravity to create experiences that push the body and imagination to its extremes.

www.julijonasurbonas.lt
Laura Cramwinckel studied Man & Public Space (BA) at Design Academy Eindhoven and Religious Studies (MA) at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, with a thesis on the makeover of dutch crematorium architecture. Working to improve death awareness she landed a job at the infamous Museum Tot Zover (‘So Long’), a fringe museum on dying, funerals and grief in Amsterdam. Here, heritage, art and contemporary design all come into play when luring visitors over the threshold. She masterminded the development of a new website, educational and participative projects, a nationwide marketing campaign as well as curating thematic exhibitions The Last Pet (2019/2020), Dutch Death Design (2022) and A Delicious Death 2023/2024).  

Currently Laura is Head of Program & Research (chief curator).

www.totzover.nl