Marta Dorotėja Lekavičiūtė, as part of the Experiments’ Platform, spent her residency in Paris exploring the transformative potential of aquatic plant biomass in sustainable urban construction. Her project, Water-Based Living, envisions reimagining water’s role in architectural design, especially focusing on repurposing “blue biomass” (aquatic plant waste) as an environmentally conscious building material instead of conventional disposal methods.

Paris’s renewed public swimming initiatives in the Seine and canals have highlighted issues of water quality and plant overgrowth, which Marta’s research addresses by exploring faucardage (aquatic plant mowing) to manage growth, improve water flow, and even repurpose biomass for sustainable construction.