Typographic Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
artists’ book, screen printing, 24 pages, 12x17cm, 2021
Paying homage to Jonas Mekas’ film in its’ title, this book is a narrative made out of typographic research, collected from frottages of urban pavements, walls, ghost signs, periodical archives, and similar. The work examines the semiotics of public urban typographic fragments collected by methods of flâneuring, where I as an artist from one post-communist space (Balkans), speculate about the possible multitemporal heterotopias of another (Baltics). The process was formed from archiving clues of the visible persistence of ghost signs from several sociopolitical eras ( Polish commonwealth, Russian Empire occupation, interwar, Soviet, independent).
notes from research diary:
In multinational societies, nationalistic fables tend to coexist one with another as antagonisms, similar to languages.
Their structures tend to resemble the linguistical one, in the sense that they can be as equally complex and altered by daily colloquial use. The cohabitation of typographic fragments - Soviet and contemporary Baltic ones- caught my eye during the 6-month stay in the region. That co-habitation, when isolated as phenomena provided an eerie sense of being displaced from place and time and resembled the presence of certain heterotopic spaces.