Cultura Lituana in Italia  is a year-long program that moves across Italy through exhibitions, festivals, biennials, museums, concert halls, and independent spaces throughout 2025 and 2026. Promoted by the Lithuanian Cultural Institute (LCI) and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Italy, the project is a journey into Lithuanian art and culture: an ideal map where two geographies intertwine, bringing the most original and influential creative expressions of Lithuania to emblematic sites of contemporary Italy. A platform for exchange between artistic scenes and cultural communities, founded on dialogue, reciprocity, and shared sensitivity.

Lithuanian Culture in Italy spans, among others, the programs of the Venice Biennale, the Val Gardena Biennale, MAXXI (Rome), MAMbo (Bologna), Artissima (Turin), Pompei, the Cineteca di Milano, the National Cinema Museum, the Presidential Hall of the Quirinale, and the Romaeuropa Festival (Rome), symbolically connecting them with Lithuania through the Kaunas Biennale, the Contemporary Art Centre (ŠMC) in Vilnius, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (MoU). By interweaving diverse formats, contexts, and audiences, it extends to independent and innovative spaces such as IUNO (Rome), Barriera (Turin), ICA (Milan), and Rupert (Vilnius).

The program gives space to voices capable of experimenting, questioning, and imagining possible futures: artists from different disciplines and periods—including Jonas Mekas, M.K. Čiurlionis, the Lithuanian Puppet Theatre, Anastasia Sosunova, Kipras Dubauskas, Augustas Serapinas, and Lina Lapelytė—will give form, in Italy, to the poetics of experimental Lithuanian cinema, the transdisciplinary narratives crossing performing arts, visual arts, and literature, as well as the music of visionary composers.

The Lithuanian artistic scene has always been a laboratory where past and present are treated as material for transformation: art, experimentation, media hybridity, archives, memory, film, photography, documentation, the centrality of time, landscape, nature, imagination, bodies, performance, and sound. Lithuanian Culture in Italy embodies all of this and more, telling the story of a country where artists are rewriting the narratives of the present, questioning concepts of identity and belonging, and asserting their place on the European cultural map.

After the 2024–2025 season dedicated to France, the Lithuanian Cultural Institute (LCI) continues its international activities of dialogue and exchange: each year, a new cultural context becomes the ground for new artistic collaborations, shared projects, and opportunities for encounter.

All the Lithuanian presences in Italy in 2025–2026 emerge from a network of invitations and collaborations with Italian partners. LCI supports and coordinates this exchange, making it both possible and sustainable, providing assistance, visibility, and logistical coordination. It is an investment in time and depth, a process in which two artistic communities choose to meet, recognize one another, and transform each other.

Follow the Instagram page of Cultura Lituana in Italia to keep up with the program as it unfolds.

Contact

Laura Gabrielaitytė-Kazulėnienė, Cultural Attaché in Italy, laura.gabrielaityte@urm.lt

Rasa Jakilaitienė, Head of the Knowledge and Communication Department, rasa.jakilaitiene@lithuanianculture.lt

Barbati Bertolissi, Press office, hello@barbatibertolissi.contact