AwithA BIO
AwithA — is a Latvian artist duo formed by Agita Maračkovska and Andris Maračkovskis. Both artists hold Master’s degrees in art, and their practice brings together contemporary art, sculpture, material experimentation, and experience within the film industry.
In 2023, Agita Maračkovska founded AwithA Workshop — a studio and creative enterprise producing
hyperrealistic silicone objects and body replicas for film, visual environments, and other creative
projects. The work taking place in the studio — experimentation with materials and the process of recreating the human body — has gradually become an integral part of AwithA’s artistic practice.
In recent years, Andris Maračkovskis has worked professionally in the international film industry, contributing to French, British, and American productions filmed in Latvia and creating sculptural objects, set elements, and other components of cinematic environments. One of his most significant projects is Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, where he worked within the Art Department / Set Decoration team, creating sculptural objects for the film.
The artists’ different areas of experience converge in their collaborative practice, where the boundaries between the workshop, artistic research, and the construction of cinematic illusion become increasingly fluid. Working with silicone, moulds, casting, and sculptural objects, they explore the human body, its representation, and its transformation through material.
The duo is currently developing AwithA Body Shop — an evolving spatial installation and artistic laboratory in which the study of the body, material experimentation, and the process of making itself become part of the artwork.
AwithA Artist Statement.
At the centre of our artistic practice is process — an ongoing exploration of the human body, material, and transformation. We are interested not only in the finished object, but in everything that happens during its creation: observation, experimentation, mould-making, testing materials, mistakes, repetition, and unexpected outcomes.
We see our workshop as a laboratory where artistic practice and research cannot be separated. It is a space in which we construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct representations of the human body, exploringhow the body can be translated into material, form, and object. Our activity within this environment — the acts of making, experimenting, and investigating — is itself part of the artwork.Working with silicone, moulds, casting, and hyperrealistic representations of the body, we also draw ontechniques associated with cinematic prop-making and special effects. Technical mastery, however, is not an end in itself. It functions as a method of research: a way of approaching the body, reproducing and transforming it, while observing what happens when a living body is translated into non-living material.
We are interested in contemporary art as an open-ended process in which the final outcome is not fully known at the beginning. Each object generates another question, each experiment can redirect the work, and failures, leftover materials, unfinished forms, and traces of the making process all become
part of the research.
AwithA Body Shop extends this practice into space. It is not simply an exhibition of finished objects, but an evolving environment — simultaneously a workshop, laboratory, shop, and installation. Bodies and body fragments exist at different stages of creation and transformation, blurring the boundary between the process of making and the exhibition itself.
For us, the artwork is not only what remains at the end of the process. The research itself — our actions, the transformation of material, and the continuous attempt to understand andreconstruct the
human body — is part of the work
