gel office is an artistic collaboration between Paula Veidenbauma and Diāna Mikāne, operating as an expandable, research-driven joint floating within matters of socio-political f(r)ictions. Zooming in and out of various spatial enigmas, their work unfolds from material and discursive artefacts, infrastructures and projected imaginaries. Lingering encounters are translated through visual art, performance, writing, and curating. As a float, gel office operates as both an intimate practice and a collective momentum. This roaming vessel navigates relational structures of host and satellite, centre and periphery, anchor and drift.

Since their formation in 2023, gel office’s joined movement has been gravitating toward complex spatial-temporal entanglements and resonating with approaches of critical spatial practice, feminist geographies, phenomenology of space, and speculative storytelling. Particularly the pan-geographical (dis)connectivity within the European Union—conceptually linking the Baltics and the Balkans. Their work approaches contemporary developments in large-scale infrastructure projects such as Rail Baltica—a train corridor aiming to connect Finland with Central Europe—and the New Silk Road, which threads through Southeastern Europe. These projects serve as lenses through which gel office explores the sticky embeddedness of capital, the politics of real estate, and the materialities of transit and delay.

With a strong interest in forms of collectivity and co-presence, since 2023 gel office facilitates ongoing research processes—such as Baltic Lines—to produce, support, and host collective modes of research, making, and being. Baltic Lines is a long-term collaborative artistic research initiative that critically engages with questions of urban transformation and connectivity along the Rail Baltica route, tracing its socio-spatial impact across the region and beyond.

In 2024, gel was invited to join the LINA community—the European architecture platform—where they were selected with their Baltic Lines project. As part of LINA, gel is collaborating on members’ projects, including the upcoming publication Staging Ground with Theatrum Mundi, and expanding Baltic Lines into a new chapter during a residency at SODAS 2123 in Vilnius (together with Jacques-Marie Ligot and Lucille Leger), produced by Architektūros fondas. The residency focuses on the politics of waiting, explored through the conceptual lens of a waiting room—a temporal and spatial container for suspended movement.

gel office’s work is made possible with support from public funding organisations including Nordic Culture Point, Nordic Culture Fund, Culture Moves Europe, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, and Estonian Culture Endowment.

Recent collaborators and presenting partners include: VARES architecture residency, Theatrum Mundi, Architektūros fondas, ISSP, InTheCloset, CCA Reading Room, FOLD, Tandeems, Living Room, Paula Buškevica, Gustavs Grasis, tours de tours, and MAJA magazine.