GODA BUDVYTYTĖ. Touch, colour and fold | MACRO

From February 24 to May 22, 2022, the MACRO Museum dedicates one of its exhibition spaces to the installation of the artist Goda Budvytytè with the collaboration of Bernardo José de Souza, ĒTER, Rasa Juškevičiūtė and Ula Sickle.

G. Budvytyte. Touch, colour and fold (Photo by Carlotta Ceccarini)

The imaginary world of the independent graphic designer, from Lithuania, Goda Budvytytè develops around a changing constellation of various formats exploring different content translated into books, visual identities, exhibitions, displays and readable meetings.

After having collaborated with several international artists, curators and writers, institutions and publishers, with Lithuanian radio and television, after participating in the Lithuanian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Budvytytè arrives in Italy at MACRO, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, with the exhibition Touch, colour and fold, curated by Sara Catenacci and produced by Veronica Botta, part of the 2022 exhibition project of renewal of contemporary art in Rome put in place by the museum, in the IN-DESIGN section.

The artist sets up a site-specific installation that occupies an entire exhibition hall of the museum. The viewer is projected into a parallel world, immersed in pages of giant books, hanging from the ceiling that descend by force of gravity to the floor.

The process of creating a book, during which touch is considered to be on a par with sight, begins with the raw material, paper, to unfold, with a synthetic method, all the elements constituting this form of culture. In a spatial and performative dimension, the touch, the perception of color and the crease that the materials assume by resting on the ground, are the primary factors that act between them, influencing each other, creating a new artistic form.

Thus arises a reflection on what is a book, how it is perceived to the touch in the hands, how it is browsed and how its pages are folded while being read, how the notions of which we come to know affect the real world and our behavior or thought, how literature can change society and the world in general. It becomes therefore fundamental every component of the bookmaking that is the corresponding touch to the paper, the color to the ink and the fold to the ligature.

These themes are explored with the collaboration of other artists including the choreographer Ula Sickle, who conducted a series of performances; the photographer Rasa Juškevičiūtė who documented, with visual insights, the different stages of creation of the work; the writer-curator De Souza, author of the words written on giant pages; and finally the architecture studio ĒTER that designed the open and changing structure of the book around an axis through which all the contributions of the exhibition space develop and generate food for thought about birth, creation and development of a book and human senses that its use goes to touch and modify.

Goda Budvytytè was able to project the viewer into a material, spatial and performative dimension, a universal environment that involves the senses of touch and sight, enveloping the viewer at 360 degrees and projecting it into the world of reading and literature.