Linas Spurga Jr.
12:15 Reading Room pristatymas
„Kursyvo kaligrafijos pagrindai“
The Basics of Italic Calligraphy
11 20, 18:00
Lapkričio 20 d. 18.00 kaligrafas ir grafikos dizaineris Linas Spurga jaun. pristatys savo kuriamo leidinio „Kursyvo kaligrafijos pagrindai“ apmatus. Sukurti knygą paskatino ne tik sukaupta patirtis, nuo 2015 metų vedant kaligrafijos kūrybinės dirbtuvės, bet ir mokomųjų kaligrafijos, tipografijos bei šrifto dizaino leidinių trūkumas lietuvių kalba. Susitikimo metu L. Spurga papasakos apie kursyvinio šrifto atsiradimą ir paplitimą XV a., populiarumą šiandien, pristatys mokomojo leidinio kūrimo eigą ir parodys keletą tarpukario laikų dailyraščio vadovėlių.
LINAS SPURGA (jaunesnysis) užsiima netradiciniu, eksperimentiniu kaligrafiniu rašymu, neįprastų įrankių naudojimu, domisi kaligrafijos istorija ir filosofija, rengia parodas („Raidės forma“ (2022), „Grafomanija“ (2023)), nuo 2015 m. veda kūrybines dirbtuves. 2017–2022 m. dirbo Vilniaus dizaino kolegijoje, kurioje nuo 2019 m. dėstė Tipografiją ir šriftą. 2019–2020 m. ir nuo 2024 m. veda kassavaitinius kaligrafijos kursus „Brūkšt“. Taip pat RARA leidyklos dizaineris, kuria grafinį dizainą „Skalvijos“ kino centro ir Meno Avilio renginiams, Vilniaus dokumentinių filmų festivaliui.
„Kursyvo kaligrafijos pagrindų“ sukūrimą ir leidybą remia Lietuvos kultūros taryba.
EN
At 6 PM November 20 calligrapher and graphic designer Linas Spurga Jr. will present his upcoming publication, The Basics of Italic Calligraphy. Motivation for this book came from leading calligraphy workshops since 2015 and by the lack of educational publications on calligraphy, typography, and type design in the Lithuanian language. During the meeting, L. Spurga will talk about the emergence and spread of Italic script in the 15th century, its popularity today, he will also present the process of creating this manual, and show several interwar-era calligraphy textbooks.
LINAS SPURGA Jr. is engaged in unconventional, experimental calligraphic writing. He uses unusual writing tools and is interested in the history and philosophy of calligraphy, organises exhibitions (The Shape of a Letter (2022), Graphomania (2023)), and has been leading creative workshops since 2015. From 2017 to 2022 he worked at Vilnius College of Design, where he taught Typography and Type Design from 2019. From 2019 to 2020 and since 2024 he has been teaching weekly calligraphy classes. He is a designer at RARA Publishing House and creates visual identities for events at the Skalvija Cinema Center and Meno Avilys, as well as for the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival.
The creation and publication of The Basics of Italic Calligraphy
is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
THE LANGUAGE (LT OR EN) OF THE EVENT WILL DEPEND ON THE PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING THE EVENT
this Sunday (26 October) at 17:00 we will gather for a reading together, this time Gintautė Siniakovaitė has chosen from what she could find in our space:
one text is from Al Hayya Issue #4 | Dreams of Liberation
by Malik Irtiza "Anything Can Be a Weapon"
and the second one is from the magazine How To Sleep Faster #15 Private "Public Pleasure: Notes on the Privatisation of Peace, Pleasure & Politics in the Public Realm" by Jack Clarke & Ruth Plston
Gintautė Siniakovaitė is a young artist (studying graphic art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts). She is interested in various forms of publication and text, and is fascinated by topics related to the use of public spaces, as well as the internal and external states of people in a rapidly changing world.
on Sunday 12th October from 5 pm, we would like to invite you to meet Swedish (Sweden based) artists / bookmakers through their books / publications
during the event you will have the chance to see the books that we received as the gifts during our visit to Stockholm this summer, from Marti Manen (INDEX), Max Ronnersjö (Antics gallery), OEI magazine (Jonas (J) Magnusson and Cecilia Grönberg), and Otsium Books (Oskar Laurin) as well as some special books gathered from bookshops and museums in Stockholm
some of these books will become part of the reading room,
while others, including rare titles,
will be added to the 12:15 private collection
there will be a variety of books and publications in different formats, including the largest photography book in our collection, artists' books, exhibition catalogues, calendars, magazines, poetry books, cassettes and books that can be /become... many things
the next reading session
this Sunday (31 08) from 17:00
this time Oscar and Luisa found reading material on our shelves, it's fascinating to see how they make their choices and respond to each other, Oscar is interested in translation, experimentation and openness, while Luisa chose a script to read with movement and dance in the language, as well as a bit of humour, they are both very thoughtful about the moment of reading, reading within the group, so the selected texts are formed based for the experience of reading in the group
the texts for this session are:
The Loving Tongue by Kira Josefsson & Jacqui Cornetta
from Erotic Review magazine issue 2
Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor and translator working between Swedish and English. Her work has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Bernard Shaw Prize. She lives in Queens, New York, and writes on US events and politics in the Swedish press.
Jacqui Cornetta is an interdisciplinary artist, translator and educator. Their writing and translations from Spanish have appeared in The Offing, Circumference, Words Without Borders, Lost & Found, Puerto Rico Review, LARB... She performs music as Settimo Cielo and teaches at Queens College CUNY.
D.I.E. Now
The True Story of John Webber and His Endless Struggle with the Table of Content
by KEREN CYTTER
Published on the occasion of the performance of Show Real Drama, this monographic publication concentrates on a performance Keren Cytter developed for If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’s edition on Masquerade (2008–10). The publication focuses both on the development of this performance and on the working process within D.I.E. Now, the dance company that was established as a result of Cytter’s collaboration with the performers.
published by If I Can't Dance
Oscar Mathieu le Bussy is a transdisciplinary art worker based in Brussels, currently in Vilnius for Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme. He likes dogs, Camp, and making soup for many people.
Luisa Berghammer is a visual artist currently based in Vienna. At the moment she is in Vilnius to participate in Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme. Luisa likes doubt, scripts and names.
until Sunday, copies of texts will be provided...
Saturday (2 August) from 17:00
we will have a reading session, during our last meeting we came up with the idea of giving participants the chance to pick a book/publication/text to read at the next session, hopefully we will create a chain method, one reading inspiring another reading, some texts reflecting on other, maybe even one day reading from images or books without the text :)
Charles and Charline have picked some texts
for us to read on Saturday
I’m perfecting my body but I can’t seem to change my lonely life
by Samuel Brzeski
Risograph printed publication comprised of poetic compositions of texts sourced from various online forums. All of the texts contain variations on the phrase ‘I just can’t’. The texts have been recomposed into a rambling poetics of the continual ‘I’, presenting an articulation of the collective consciousness of certain corners of internet culture.
2021, published by TEXST
Coming to Writing (1976)
by Hélène Cixous
Of Helene Cixous's many and diverse writings, few have been translated into English. Cixous is known for her work on sexual difference and its relations to literary text. Here she explores the problematics of a "feminine" mode of writing, basing her method on the premise that differences between the sexes - viewed as a paradigm for all difference, which is the organizing principle behind identity and meaning - manifest themselves, write themselves, in texts.
2024, published by Cutt Press
Charles de Agustin is an artist, educator, and organizer from the US, currently in Vilnius for Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme. July, for him, was characterized by oscillations between despair and renewal. In August, Charles is teaching a course titled “Necrophilanthropy” at the School of Making Thinking.
Charline Gdalia is an artist and curator based in Germany, but right now in Vilnius for some months as part of the AEP in Rupert. She makes sometimes films, sometimes writes, sometimes cooks, sometimes organizes stuff, and occasionally reads too !
printed texts will be available, see you on Saturday
this Sunday (6 July) from 17:00, we will hold a reading session before a two-week break for a research trip. We will be closed during this time.
This time, we have picked up the latest editions for our bookshop from our friends BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE - Corals by Natalie Häusler (Berlin based artist and poet).
Corals is a physical environment as well as a multilingual poem (English, German, French) written over a period of one-and-a-half years. Initially, the poem is situated in and around the sea. The underwater world gradually collapses and merges at times with virtual reality. Corals is an attempt to create a poem that acts like a living organism.
“‘Sex,’ writes Berlin based artist and poet Natalie Häusler in her book-length poem Corals, ‘is the ecology of the poem.’ Or put differently, a poem can only exist in the relationships between bodies – in the eroticism of being-together that is continually formed and transformed through language […] The poem itself plays with its homophone ‘choral,’ ebbing and flowing in various directions, using saturated imagery and linguistic shifts.” (Matthew Rana)
And the second book - "hatefuck the reader" by Penny Goring, published by Arcadia Missa.
“This book is about damage and violence, about the ramifications of channeling intensity at all costs. It is a text that is utterly compelling, that you tumble into and cannot escape from. I fucking loved it.” — Dodie Bellamy
We warmly invite you to the opening of [Sic]: Books by Paulius Petraitis on Wednesday, 18 June at 6 pm in our reading room. On view throughout the summer, the exhibition presents a retrospective selection of Petraitis’ diverse publishing practice — from early self-published zines to artist’s books and edited volumes. Spanning from 2009 to the present day, the exhibition explores how Petraitis’ artistic inquiries take shape in the form of the book, become the book, follow the logic of the book, or migrate across multiple publications.
At 7 pm, Paulius Petraitis will be in conversation with curator Paulius Andriuškevičius. Together, they will open up and discuss a number of Petraitis’ artist’s books, offering insights into the ideas and processes behind them.
poster of the exhibition by Eline Cremers
PAULIUS PETRAITIS is a Vilnius-based artist-theorist and independent curator whose practice centres on photography’s expanded field and its relationship to wider socio-cultural narratives. A defining aspect of his work is his longstanding engagement with publishing as both a medium and method of inquiry, exploring how images intersect with technology, meaning-making, and visual culture.
Working under his own name and previously under the alias Paul Paper, Petraitis has developed a diverse and critically engaged body of publications — ranging from accessible black-and-white zines to conceptually ambitious artist’s books and edited volumes. Key works include A man with dark hair and a sunset in the background, Smoke Screen, and Contemporary Photography. He is also the editor of Too Good to be Photographed, an anthology exploring the relationship between photography and failure, with contributions from 47 international artists. Petraitis’s books are held in the collections of major institutions, including the libraries of MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MACBA, the International Center of Photography, Yale University, Denmark Design Museum, the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection (SAIC), and the Clark Art Institute.
25 May, from 17:00 Marija Repšytė, the founder of the 12:15 Reading Room, will share how the reading room/bookstore came into being, what books and publications can be found in the attic in Vilnius Old Town, and will talk about some of the publications and artists' books she has selected and will be bringing for this particular evening at Draugų vardai.
SUNDAY 11 MAY 16:00
reading session #6
this time we will open differen magazines and journals
SUNDAY 23 MARCH 16:00
reading session #5
we will be around the smell and our 5th sense captured in books
SUNDAY 26 JANUARY 16:00
reading session #4
this time we will open the publications of Cutt Press
let’s meet this Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00
to taste Anya’s fantasies in baked forms.
As she said: “mix of everything, of favourite things, ideas that stay in your mind, never made...share with others.”
There will be legendary - miso buns!!!
from 14:00 Diana during an embroidery session with reflective thread on her created hats, presenting her research into materials and ideas of reflectivity and her clothing brand Human and the City that explores the experiences of a human being as a creature of nature within the city, the principles of defence in stressful situations, and the desire for safety.
we are in
Klaipeda culture communication center
On 9th November from 14:00 we invite you to the BOOK ART FESTIVAL FORUM, an event focusing on young creators in art and graphic design, international collaborations and ideas looking for different forms of publications or books.
PARTICIPANTS:
ARKLYS press (Mindaugas Aniūnas and Mantas Puodžiukaitis)
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar
GEGUTĖ magazine (Deividas Preišegalavičius and Dominykas Matulionis)
*as a Journal (Kotryna Lingienė)
Agnes Isabelle Veevo
Curated by 12:15 Reading Room
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar and Agnes Isabelle Veevo from Estonia are coming to Klaipėda and already participating in the Book Art Festival - both of their works are presented in the exhibition “in a maze”.
The two young artists are collaborating on the Estonian-Lithuanian artists’ publication “Friendship Forever”, published by 12:15: Maria Izabella’s work will be featured and Agnes Isabelle will design the entire publication.
@fullautofoundry in the visuals of the text
Pijus Sadauskas, Ugnius Bagdonavičius, Karl-Christoph Rebane, Hedi Jaansoo, Kipras Štreimikis, Gedimina Šalkauskaitė, Gediminas Sass
this friday - second round - in a maze in Klaipeda Culture Communication Center
“in a maze” is a travelling exhibition, held for the first time this year at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, featuring one-of-a-kind artists’ books from the Graphic Arts Cabinet of the Vilnius University Library. In Klaipėda, these books will be replaced by books by Estonian artists of all ages and books found on the shelves of the archive of the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. There will also be books/publications by graphic designers studying and working in Estonia that have been realised from conception to implementation.
more open, less behind the glass but still about wondering and of course enjoying great books!!
Participating artists:
Donatas Jankauskas (Duonis), Dovilė Šimonytė, Mariana Castillo Deball, Marge Monko, Club Donny magazine (Samira Ben Laloua, Frank Bruggeman and Ernst van der Hoeven), Elena Narbutaitė and Deimantas Narkevičius, OPA! Publishing (Ott Kagovere), Maria Izabella Lehtsaar, Sophie Calle, Goda Palekaitė, Agnes Isabelle Veevo, Catalog (Lieven Lahaye), Andre Joosep Arming, Ignacy Radtke, ;paranoia publishing (kiwa; Henri Hütt and Evelyn Raudsepp), Francesco Paleari, Francesco Villa, Laura Kuusk, Urtina Hoxha, Andrew J Beltran, Daria Luchinina, Mahmoud Khaled, Florian Bräunlich, Katja Mater, brossura | manual of pirate languages (Dimitra Ioannou, Yiannis I. Andronikidis), Sophie Artz, Trinn Tamm, Oleksandra Hruzynska, Yorgos Sapountzis, Carlo Canún, Dear Friend (Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere), Ieva Maslinskaitė, Apian, Viktorija Rybakova, Pierre Satoshi Benoit, Alissa Nirgi, Sayo Senoo
curated by “12:15 Reading Room”
more information about the exhibition
and the piece in the poster by Ott Kagovere OPA 07 Time to love (2024), published by OPA!
photography by Gediminas Sass
join us next week on Thursday (26 09) at 6pm for an event
IN WHAT LANGUAGE DO YOU DREAM?
IT DEPENDS ON THE DREAM
we will have a guest Greek/Italian poet from England, ALEX KERAMIDAS, who will be launching her books and reading from “Vestibular Training” (published by @boredwolves) and also from her latest book/pamphlet “Guidance to translating sound on paper (after Pitman’s)”, published by Zimzalla press
she will be surrounded
by friends and readers of the “12:15 Reading Room”:
Artist DOVILĖ ŠIMONYTĖ will teleport us to Biržai, where she was born while reading from her “Queen of Wands” (published by 12:15) in her native dialect
MALKA SULTAN, oh she is many things - model, performer, food experimenter, born in Aden, Yemen, now lives in Vilnius, she also writes and during the event she will share writings form her summer smells in Mumbai
And KAMILĖ ŠOPYTĖ studied Lithuanian language, now is occupied with other, quite different things, but what she reads - can really surprise many. She will read from one of the reading room books, in a conversation she will explore the role of poetry as a decolonial practice and as a tool for resistance
please come to welcome Alex to our city and our place!!
until speaking in different tongues and languages in the dreams
poster by Faye McNulty
we would like to invite you to our 2nd event
12th September (Thursday) 18:30
this time is a workshop
by REN LOREN BRITTON & GODA KLUMBYTĖ
SLIME REMIX
collected algorithmic experiments
In this workshop Britton & Klumbytė will share their work over the years of mulling about and researching the queer intersections between algorithms and various more-than-human and human bodies. Taking a walk through their slow burn research they will cross articles such as “Said the bot to the computer: 57th collected significant residue transmission between MIT and SliMoSA 3”, “Abstracting Otherwise: In Search of A Common Strategy for Arts and Computing” and “(V)empirical Structures and Roses in Reginastraße: After Dialectics”.
Introducing their collaborative work they will draw lines of connection and follow some edits they would still make today. The workshop will conclude with an algorithmic experiment following a KNN (K- Nearest Neighbors) algorithm that they will reconfigure to engage embodiment, reading, proximity
and kinship with all the bodies present.
Britton & Klumbytė are working on a publication
that this workshop will be part of.
Join us next week on Wednesday (31 07) at 6pm for an event where these artists: Gosia Lehmann, Varvara Spilt, Margarita Valionytė, Nunilo Rumbutis and Anya Karanevskaya will present different artistic practices and publications that explore the themes of saving, keeping, memorising, while creating and sharing archives.
We invite you to enter this exhibition and the books on display as a maze or labyrinth, your choice, whether you prefer a simple or an excitingly confusing journey. Just one clue for this challenge – everything happens in your imagination, all the books here try to interact with it in different ways, abstract pictures with many meanings, imaginary stories and narratives that come alive through photographed images or through the written word.
“in a maze” will open Friday, June 28, 5 p.m.
at M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art
Participating artists:
Donatas Jankauskas (Duonis), Dovilė Šimonytė, Mariana Castillo Deball, Vincas Kisarauskas, Club Donny magazine (Samira Ben Laloua, Frank Bruggeman and Ernst van der Hoeven), Elena Narbutaitė, Deimantas Narkevičius, Sophie Calle, Goda Palekaitė, Mindaugas Navakas, Ignacy Radtke, Aleksas Andriuškevičius, Francesco Paleari, Francesco Villa, Mahmoud Khaled, Juozas Laivys, Florian Bräunlich, Katja Mater, brossura | manual of pirate languages (Dimitra Ioannou, Yiannis I. Andronikidis), Sophie Artz, Linas Jablonskis, Yorgos Sapountzis, Unknown artist, Žibuntas Mikšys, Rainer Mordmüller, Pierre Migaux, Ieva Maslinskaitė, Apian, Viktorija Rybakova, Sayo Senoo.
more information about the exhibition
it will run until 29 of September
see you there in the maze of the books
image: from Yorgos Sapountzis In the Moment You Fall Asleep (2019), published by BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE
poster design by Jonas Vaikšnoras
photography by Gustina Keturakytė
saturday (11 05) from 16:00
the readings will be around the themes of dance, movement, languages, gestures and different patterns of expression, with the writings of Mette Edvardsen (her text: “one long continuous line or a thought that dissolves into the distance” is in the cover of the event), Sara Manente, Janne-Camilla Lyster or Jonathan Burrows
we will see where the afternoon take us
session 2 THIS SATURDAY (20th of April) from 16:00 to ...
if you spotted a book when you visited us or you saw us sharing publication here that you would like to read, write us, and we will collect a reading material for this Saturday and this meeting from your wishlist
waiting for your thoughts..
image: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure at City Lights bookstore, 1957
next Saturday (30 03) from 14:00 to 16:00, we meet for a reading session, to get to know Stolon press from Australia here in Vilnius through their publications
we will be reading from their pocket series
if you want to come, write to us, I will send you a reading material to print or have on your phone, if smb just decides to come by I will have some copies printed for you
STOLON PRESS acknowledges the Gadigal and Wangal peoples of the Eora Nation as the first and continuing custodians of the lands on which we live and work, and pay respect to Elders past and present.
STOLON PRESS was started in Sydney in 2019 by Tom Melick and Simryn Gill as a way to publish texts and images that might easily fall through cracks or remain in boxes and bottom drawers. Its growing list of titles follows the paths of friendships and longstanding conversations. Like the plants from which it takes its name, Stolon Press works close to the ground, opportunistic in modest terrain and untended places.
