Introduction

After we publicly announced this past summer that Rupert would leave its serene and sanatorium-like home of more than 10 years, a journalist asked me: How would Rupert deal with the identity crisis that could potentially be caused by this move? 

Rupert has a nomadic identity in its DNA. Founded without an official home, it has changed its shape many times. It changes with each new set of artists. It changes as the creative topics Rupert explores continue to evolve. Even now, during this last, transformative year, it continued moving all the time.

We believe that coming into this new, urban context with its rich, complicated history, and becoming a neighbour, will allow Rupert’s identity to flourish. We aim to engage, in an even more committed manner, with what it means to work with education, what it means to safeguard a creative process, and how to build long-lasting relations with our audience.

Why do we need spaces like Rupert? As a team, we are asked this constantly—and we ask ourselves the same question. At the time of writing this text, the world’s brutality and violence are caving in, ever stronger. Precisely because of this, we invite you to celebrate, now and into the future, the potential of creative thought and expression.

The ideas that converged during this evolution incorporated a whole village’s worth of energy and knowledge. Jana and Augustinas, who thought about Rupert as a gift: to artists, to our community, to the city. Ona and Petras, who envisioned Rupert as an operative space. The Rupert team, who imagined our new identity as a home for artists. Donna Marcus Duke, who inspired us to consider Rupert’s institutionality as a technology of delusion; believing in, and acting on the shifting paradigms. All those who continue to make Rupert as a refuge for hope, in a world of uncertain, forking realities.

The Rupert team and I sincerely thank the many people who made the exciting metamorphosis of this last year possible. First, we recognise our shareholders, who made Rupert’s architectural and spatial transformation attainable: Darius Žakaitis, Darius Rugys, Laura Blaževičiūtė, Rokas Pečiulaitis, and Dimitrijus Borisenka. We thank the Rupert board for their guidance and support, including Deividas Rafanavičius, Daiva Lialytė, Lolita Jablonskienė, and Justė Jonutytė. 

The contributions of our architects Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora cannot be overstated, along with the hard work of interior project manager Sigita Bieliauskienė, and Diana Misevičiūtė of Techzity.

I also thank the Rupert team and its wider circle: JL Murtaugh, Aistė Frišmantaitė, Monika Lipšic, Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė, Goda Palekaitė, Agnė Liukaitytė, communication expert Stefanija Jokštytė, our graphic designers Jana Liebe and Augustinas Milkus, photographer Lukas Mykolaitis, and particularly our dedicated interns, Kornelija Žvinklytė, Gustė Kripaitė, and Ioanna Valavanis.

Additionally, I want to recognise all the skilled and often unrecognised labourers who worked tirelessly to make this happen. The many dedicated construction workers, carpenters, plumbers, and all other tradespeople contributed their talent and sweat equity to bring this change to life.

We welcome you all to Mindaugo 15, and to Rupert’s next era.
Viktorija Šiaulytė
Director

ARITHMOPHILIA, and the TECHNOLOGIES of DELUSION and RESONANCE

Over the past year, against all odds, Rupert has undergone a significant transformation.

We navigated this process together, guided by a firm belief that rejuvenating this institution, amidst the compounding destruction and retrenchment occurring throughout the world, is a necessary act. With the generous support of our new shareholder group, our new facility is a gift to artists, to our community, and to the city of Vilnius—as well as a confident statement that space for creative ideas will remain essential. We invite you to celebrate with us.

In her performative acceptance address in anticipation of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Donna Marcus Duke (Rupert Alternative Education Programme alumna, 2024) proclaimed that ‘institutions are technologies of delusion.’ While the focus of her research was on the contradictory para-academic Charlotte Bach, it also alluded to the potential of institutions to embrace seemingly ‘delusional’ beliefs and confront topics far larger than themselves—such as the economy, war, health, and tyranny.

Each day, we ask ourselves—what is our responsibility? Is it external, to quantify the creative work of artists, to serve outward interests? Is it local, to represent this city and country on an international stage? Is it internal, to offer protective space, and defend the creative process and the privacy it needs to flourish?

This project marks the most substantial physical and structural change in Rupert’s history. It is simultaneously concrete (in terms of material and financial resources) and a leap of faith into an unknown future. As our present context of innumerable forking paths and unanticipated realities becomes increasingly erratic, the mechanisms of bureaucracy incongruously require us to give into arithmophilia—a love for numbers—to measure, calculate, and project certainty.

Are art institutions like ours mere technologies of delusion and hope, enacting the contrived labour to measure and defend artistic process? For a long time, to paraphrase author and programmer Alexander Galloway, the creative process could be considered uncomputable and ‘outside of discreet rationality.’ Arithmophilic society—addicted to quantifiable data—paradoxically left the door open and unguarded for calculated human irrationality and bias to take hold. All this as we hurriedly transfer the structural responsibility of calculating impact to automated, self-learning entities, trained to exploit our weaknesses.

To paraphrase architect Balkrishna Doshi, artists and institutions are not expressions of attitudes, but builders of attitudes. This is a time for resonance, rather than conclusion. In the face of so much overwhelming rhetoric and violence, can we maintain a zone for the unknowable? As put by Duke, in her essay for the last Rupert Journal, ‘When we’re lucky, resonance can lead to discoveries that shift paradigms.’

For the opening programme of Rupert at Mindaugo 15, we ask a group of recent and future Rupert alumni to consider an important question. How do artists mediate their inward focus—a private space for life and process—with the mounting external pressures of quantifying creativity? Their thoughtful and outlandish languages of economy and scientific inquiry provide new portals into what is ostensibly incalculable, but critically invaluable. This, we hope and imagine, defines the artists’ home we need today.

“I think the question of what research feels like is too often forgotten. Why do we want to produce knowledge? What are the affective and erotic motivations for our work? (…) Self-obsessed delusion is the key to contributing something new to knowledge artistically, it’s the belief that self-experience and personal imagination can produce something useful how others understand the world and themselves. Without it, how can we ever deviate from unsatisfactory scientific confines? The value of knowledge—for good and for bad—can be resonance rather than truth, and I think resonance usually requires something personal. When we’re lucky, resonance can lead to discoveries that shift paradigms.” — Donna Marcus Duke, Rupert Journal #1, 2024

NOBEL ENDOWMENT CONFIRMATION FOR THE DUKE FOUNDATION OF FUTURE RESEARCH ARTS UNDER DURESS

NOBEL ENDOWMENT CONFIRMATION FOR
THE DUKE FOUNDATION OF FUTURE RESEARCH ARTS UNDER DURESS
TO BE LOCATED AT RUPERT, MINDAUGO 15, VILNIUS

Dear Rupert Team,

Despite these strenuous and historic times, I am delighted to be writing to you regarding the opening of Rupert’s new space and the announcement of The Duke Foundation for Future Research Arts Under Duress.

On the 23rd, 24th and 25th of October, I confirm that I, Donna Marcus Duke, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine 2024, will humbly welcome Vilnius’ local arts community throughout the duration of the commencement evenings. As the primary funder of Rupert’s relocation, it shall also be my honour to make a short speech of between 5-10 minutes on behalf of myself and the subsidiary donors. I will share why I have chosen Rupert to be the recipient of the Nobel Foundation’s grant, outline a vision for institutions beyond being a technology of delusion, and of course highlight our gratitude to the industrious team at Rupert for their commitment to artistic research in Lithuania and beyond.

As you all know, the endowment from the Nobel Foundation has come to fund the relocation of Rupert, on the condition of the establishment of The Duke Foundation of Future Research Arts Under Duress. Within Rupert, the foundation ensures the centre’s continued commitment to the most urgent matters in artistic research whilst securing the legacy of my endowment from the Nobel Foundation. The opening of the new space is an opportune moment to announce the foundation and to unveil a plaque commemorating it. I propose my speech happens beside the plaque which, naturally, shall require a ribbon cutting ceremony featuring three-foot scissors. Please see overleaf for suggested dimensions and materials.

At such a momentous occasion, it is also the duty of the primary donor to be dressed with the according glamour. Whilst I am in talks with the top stylists at Prada and Loewe, I shall also magnanimously consider your suggestions of local designers in Vilnius. Reference images are to be found overleaf.

Alongside my presence at the event, and should time allow, I would like to add a trustee’s note into the publication which shall outline some of my thoughts, mentioned above. If there is time, I have Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th September earmarked for writing. I apologise this could not be done sooner. International commitments to the Nobel Foundation have tarried me.

I look forward to your notes and confirmation of the above.

With my most gracious wishes,


Donna Marcus Duke 

Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine 2024 

Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Viktorija Šiaulytė in conversation with Todd Anderson (School for Poetic Computation)

The School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) is an experimental school in New York City and online founded in 2013. It facilitates the study of art, code, hardware, and critical theory through lenses of decolonization and transformative justice. They ground their programmes in solidarity across social differences, and promote empowerment through a deeper technical and political understanding of the tools to build just communities. As Rupert moves to the former premises of the Young Technicians shop, and after thirteen years running the Alternative Education Programme, we connected with Todd Anderson, one of  SFPC’s co-directors, for a conversation.

Viktorija Šiaulytė:
SFPC’s structure is very interesting. In 2021, you made a big change in your governance and programming. It was a very particular moment in United States history which catalysed the change. After nearly five years, how have these governance changes gone? What have you learned? Where do you find yourself today, operating in a completely different political context? 

Todd Anderson (SFPC): 

Things have been going really well. Our goals over the last four or five years aren’t so different from the school’s founding in 2013, in response to the student debt crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the education affordability crisis. I’m not sure what academic work culture is in Lithuania, but in the US, especially the technology, arts, or digital humanities fields, often that work falls on part-time adjunct professors who are not offered long-term contracts. The students pay tons of money to take classes with these teachers, who are often underpaid working artists. We desired a better way, where these artists and part-time professors, could create a school with control over what we want to teach, where it’s affordable, and where students have a direct relationship to their teachers.

That ideology still lives on. When our new leadership began in 2021, we wanted to make it even more affordable. It was always significantly cheaper than US universities, but since then we also instituted a pay-what-you-can programme. You apply to a class and say what tuition you could afford. Then, you are accepted at that tuition, or not. We can bring in more people from different backgrounds and meet them at what they’re able to afford. 

Since 2021, the current leadership of the school emerged out of something like a union of the school’s longstanding teachers and organizers. It’s important to understand that being a union of organized workers at a small, alternative school is a little different. The school wasn’t a profitable enterprise, constantly churning through workers. Our group had been involved a long time. 

For several years we operated as seven co-directors. We’d get together,have all-hands meetings regularly, and make group decisions. I feel we made really good choices with lots of input, but after a few years, we started reaching that model’s limitations. We were too many for anyone to do the job full-time. While we made good decisions, we were becoming a non-profit and couldn’t make them as quickly as needed. There was a second transition in 2024 when we went down to three full-time employees, of which I’m one, along with co-director Neta Bomani. Our third colleague Celine Wong Katzman recently left, taking a curatorial role at Creative Time. 

VŠ:

Besides this economic aspect of the need for alternative educational structures, now we hear about Ivy League universities in the US being under huge political pressure. Where does your school position yourself in this regard?

SFPC:

We are very outspoken about being a progressive leftist school. The frequent conflicts between politics, power, and money are definitely visible in American education.

As an independent alternative school, we are one of the few who can be open about our politics and point of view. For example, being outspoken about Palestine and Gaza limits the funding we can receive, and who wants to be associated with us. That’s an exchange we’re fine to make. We are very clear about our values and the environment people will be studying in.

Our mission is that technology education, instead of being a utilitarian efficiency machine, should be creating more just communities and building solidarity. That informs all of our classes. We have our non-profit designation, but being a little smaller, we can articulate this better than bigger institutions.

VŠ:

I’m very curious, regarding creating a more just community—how do you sustain that? With what kind of methodologies or tools?

SFPC:

We celebrate and encourage a fluid interchange between teacher and learner roles. Neta and I started as students here, then later became teachers. What is unique to SFPC, even among alternative schools, is that we prioritize not having the teacher be alone in the classroom. Meaning either an assistant teacher or a co-teacher are in the class supporting the main teacher. It’s a great transitional role. A teacher can tell us, ‘that student was great and wanted to get more involved’. Then we can consider them a potential assistant teacher candidate. Many teachers and assistant teachers become close friends or collaborators, because we try and put related practices together, that can learn from each other.

Especially in the States, there’s a mindset of: go to high school, university, maybe graduate school, and then you’re kind of done learning. We want a culture where you’re never done learning. It’s an ongoing place you can continue to study, even if you’re very qualified and competent in your field. We bring our teachers into advisory panels. Our board of directors has former teachers from the school, and there’s many people who move through different roles here to influence, and lead.

VŠ:
The curriculums you develop are also fascinating to me. In Rupert, for example, we run an annual six-month long education programme. Every year it’s completely different, like starting a school from scratch. I find it beautiful that we can run a structure like this, which is rather precious and actually quite expensive. I have been on boards reviewing formal arts education, seeing the back-end, how much bureaucratic and administrative labor and effort is needed just to sustain how formal education is documented. Obviously, in that context, constant reinvention is not feasible. How it has been for your organization, working with this kind of education, that can react faster to the urgencies and questions that emerge?

SFPC:

We’re at a point where we’re trying to implement more structure and consistency, in addition to rapid response and experimentation. Before 2020, when classes were largely in-person, it was structured like high school. Monday through Thursday, from 10 to 3, there would be a code class, an electronics and hardware class, a critical theory and an art making class. A fourth class was variable, either a poetry or an art history class. We’ve tried to find balance. Over time, we’ll look at the metrics of our classes, their popularity, the feedback from students, and teachers’ feedback before deciding to book that programme again. Doing this we built up a handful of evergreen, returning classes. 

One is Solidarity Infrastructures. This is a great class taught by Max Fowler and Meghna Mahadevan, about setting up your own servers, controlling your own technology—basically how to build infrastructure that you own and control, rather than going through a big tech partner. That’s an increasingly important and desirable skill set, which can adapt and change. As new protocols come in, they are incorporated into the class. If you’ve been around the school a while you’ll be looking for an opportunity to take Solidarity Infrastructure.

I teach HTTPoetics, about making websites from a poetic perspective. We have Melanie Hoff teaching Digital Love Languages and American Artist teaching Dark Matters. In New York City, many people teach part-time at other universities, but don’t have control over what they get to teach. They don’t feel they have any connection with the administration to develop their class. We try to work with teachers. My co-director Neta spends lots of time with them, developing their syllabi and making them a good fit for SFPC.

VŠ:
What does it mean for you to go “outside” of your school? Are you trying to find ways to intervene in the art world with its own presets, or, a corporate technology world, to contradict the certain defined ways of operating in those fields? 

SFPC:
We’re less interested in being a disruptor: taking it over a field, and changing it. We provide another way, or show another example. There are powerful forces in the communities of art, tech, and education. We are making an alternative culture of art, alternative culture of education, an alternative culture of technology. Many of our students and teachers had negative experiences working in corporate tech, being crushed in a massive university system, or having crushing amounts of debt. We’re not trying to dive into those places and change them, but rather create a viable alternative to exist outside of those spaces. Maybe they can change the culture by showing what else is possible.

We like publishing how we do things, what’s going on in our classes, the work students are making; because we want to support them. There’s not one way of doing everything.

If I am trying to disrupt anything, it is education. We’re consciously trying to bring the price down and challenge the idea that if you’d like to learn, then your options are either spend a lot of money, or commit five years to that topic. We want to change the thinking behind that decision. You can continue learning, be part of a community and experiment, without it being a massive life-changing event where you move out of your home, or change your career.

VŠ:
Is there anything I didn’t ask you would like to add? 

SFPC:

We’re primarily an online school, though historically we’ve been in-person. I think around 25% of our students are here in New York City, but we have students from all over the world. We have students in London and Berlin. We have one Lithuanian student, at least one self-proclaimed Lithuanian alum. I would love there to be more. We have students from Europe and Africa. That’s changed since we moved the school online. We’re trying to build a close-knit, international community. We aren’t so far away from your community as it might appear.

Ieva Gražytė in conversation with Bahar Noorizadeh (Weird Economies)

Ieva Gražytė:
The relationship between culture and finance has always been complex—art both resists and relies on economic structures. How does Weird Economies position itself within this entanglement, and what practices have you developed to rethink or reframe these dynamics?

Bahar Noorizadeh (Weird Economies):
I began thinking about art and economy while collaborating with my friend Galia Sadovi on the neoliberalization of art and how it shapes both what and how we make. The contemporary institutional framework of art conditions how artists function, work, and produce—if there is such a thing as an ‘art field’, its rules matter. We explored regulatory frameworks and how revised protocols, or reworked forms of unionizing, might open new avenues. That was the starting point.

As my work developed—including during my PhD—my focus shifted from older modes of economic thought to finance and financialization, and to what this move toward speculative finance means for the questions we were asking and for art’s material context. This is also where more philosophical analysis came in: time, temporality, speculation.

In a way, art after the modernist turn runs in parallel with economic thought’s evolution toward the hyper-abstraction represented by the financial regime. You can trace a movement toward abstraction in both art history and finance capital.

Weird Economies started as a project to bring together people and collectives thinking practices concerned with the entanglement of art and capital: artistic projects, radical initiatives, even monetary experiments. We used a broad definition of ‘artistic practice’ that could include monetary experimentation if it worked through those realms in radical ways. It began as a research project, but it also became an experimental platform for testing how an art project might engage the financial cosmology—what involvement could look like and what it might mean.

IG:
On your website you note that economy draws on oikos and nomos—the ‘management of the household’. Weird Economies reframes this through Freud’s Unheimlich, the unhomely. Art institutions (including Rupert) often function as a kind of household for international artists and diverse practices. How might we rethink artistic institutions, especially residencies, which are literally households—as sites of unhomely governance and cultural policy-making? What new possibilities emerge if we embrace their inherent weirdness as structural rather than incidental?

WE:
Let me first touch on the context you mentioned Rupert’s new site and then come back to the question.

Weird Economies began as an individual initiative. Later, I invited others to join as board and team members. We kept a strong spirit of experimentation. I tried to lay out a framework that would create conditions for contingent forms of speculation to emerge through the platform. That’s why the website looks unruly: after four years, it’s still hard to fit all its tentacular parts under a single definition. We adopted a decentralized logic: people could join, define their own project, and it might grow into a category that generated new work.

As for ‘research outcomes’, the initial questions evolved through community and took many shapes. But several practical observations stood out—relevant to your move to a new site and to the broader shift from older economic formats to an age of financialization and speculation.

First, we can’t take collectivity for granted. This isn’t only about wages, fair payments, or classic models of involvement. A financialized logic runs through almost everything we do as collaborative projects and institutions. There is a built-in self-sacrifice that often becomes self-exploitation—more time, more unpaid labor—because anything of perceived value seems to demand it. Even with the best payment frameworks, investment comes from another cosmology: speculative value, where people’s efforts generate credit and credibility the organization later holds. So the real question is: what kind of value does a project generate, and who harvests it?

Traditionally, art institutions try to stay ‘clean’ of the value they generate, especially its financialized aspects. But if you leave that territory open, someone else harvests the financial crop—often real-estate projects or other financial actors. For Rupert, if the site is an old factory with remaining artifacts, the question becomes: which parts of what the building or institution owns are assetable, how might they become assets, and who controls their use? What is the ownership and economic structure? Facing the ‘vulgar’ question of money can actually open space for radical imagination.

A wider context matters too. In Western Europe and North America, we’re seeing waves of defunding and a reactionary turn against public funding. Alongside censorship concerns, many institutions are asking whether private funding can be engaged more tactically—sometimes even clandestinely—to enable work that public infrastructures currently block. There’s no universal answer, it’s context-specific. But the strategic question remains: what kind of Trojan horse can you build with the resources you actually have?

IG:
I’m less concerned about funding per se, than about who profits from artistic practices. How might institutions navigate unhomely governance? Two days ago Lithuania saw one of its largest art-worker protests. This isn’t only about public or private funding; it’s also about the content artists produce and who gains from that production.

WE:
Right, and who is identified as the beneficiary.

IG:
Rupert’s new building once housed the Young Technician’s Shop, a Soviet-era store where generations of children encountered tools and technologies as toys, and learned the logics of planned economy and ideology as games. In your podcast Against the Fascist Game, you discuss gamification and how ‘the exploits of play’ reveal that almost nothing is simply fun and games. How might cultural institutions foster practices that are both playful and critical—nurturing creativity while resisting the exploitative dimensions of play that permeate contemporary life and work?

WE:
First, credit to Max Haiven, Faye Harvey, and Hallie Frost, who developed the last season of Exploits of Play; the gamification conundrum has been central to Weird Economies for some time. The link between finance and gamification was part of our original framework: finance depends on a kind of playful imagination—the same ‘weird’ space we explore.

Practically, we have been asking how Weird Economies might become self-sustaining and eventually detach from public funding. Public support enabled our first four-year cycle (from the Canada Council for the Arts), building enough infrastructure to launch toward a broader ecosystem—a Weird Economies ‘economy’, if you like. The long-term idea is to form a community that sustains the project and to create a currency for exchange within that community. That brings us directly to currency and community design. We’ve been prototyping and now need to move into more hands-on workshopping to build a generative ecosystem.

My thinking oscillates—deliberately—between abolishing the institution and working through the financialized regime to sustain certain practices. I’m not interested in a tepid middle. Weird Economies was never meant to persist for its own sake. Continuing just to continue is how projects become zombified. If something needs to end, it should end. If a break is needed, take a break. After four years, we’re asking which elements to carry forward and which to let go. That requires being radically open to your own termination, while being clear about the stakes you still want to advance. Otherwise the work dilutes into institutional routine.

IG:
Thank you, Bahar. I appreciate the clarity that if something has to end, it can end. There should be no obligation to produce research or art for production’s sake.

WE:
David Graeber put it well: if you can stop working, that’s a genuinely utopian gesture. Yet we tend to ‘fix’ things with more production and more work. There’s value in pause—but under speculative conditions even a pause is captured somewhere as generation, or it’s framed as a kind of death. Hence my oscillation between abolition and financial navigation; they speak to each other more than to reformism.

For Rupert, a practical step is to map what forms of value—monetary, financial, social credit, investment—are already being generated by the site. Most places already host an economy in the soil. How can that be identified, extrapolated, and intentionally mobilized? Start by foregrounding the infrastructure’s political economy rather than treating it as background knowledge. That orientation enables more radical thinking.IG:
I agree. I’ll include this in the interview and ensure Rupert’s team and board engage with these questions.

Ieva Gražytė in conversation with Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora (IXL)

Ieva Gražytė:
So, Rupert is moving into a new home in the very centre of Vilnius. However, this new beginning unfolds in a building with a rich history. Built in 1957, it originally housed the Young Technician’s Shop, a space where entire generations of children were introduced to tools, machines, technologies, and, at the same time, ideologies. Later, for a while, it housed the Lithuanian Railways administrative office, which left its mark with the aesthetics of the 2000s, in the form of suspended ceilings and carpeted floors. How, in your opinion, does the history of a space—its past inhabitants, functions, and pedagogical legacy—shape or haunt what a cultural organization can become, and how did you navigate these historical layers in the process of reconstructing the space?

Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora (IXL Studio):
When creating architecture today, we often think about how not to erase the ‘legacies’ of the past, and how to reinterpret them when creating contemporary expression. Therefore, we considered how both the history of the place and Rupert’s identity could simultaneously participate in this non-standard spatial constellation, in light of this new institution moving in. We leave a plethora of references in these spaces—both direct material ‘archaeology’ and material references, as well as solutions that interpret them.

The material layers of the Young Technician’s historic interior, which we extracted from under the plasterboard and carpet coverings that concealed them—terrazzo tile floors, granulated plaster interior facade, plaster ceilings with ornamented cornices, as well as infrastructure—created quite a few situations for all of this material ‘text.’ These are monumental layers where, as if in a rock that has not been completely processed, or has cracked, we began to look for multifunctional operational arrangements and interventions that encourage change and create new layers.

Regarding those interior layers of ‘The Young Technician’—although they are vividly etched in the memories of many city dwellers as reflections of their childhood, they have not physically survived. We rather reminisce about them, through the nature of new interventions. We drew ideas from this context for technical, infrastructural interventions that enable the efficient use, transformation, and construction of planned activities. The intersecting or encircling rails, joints, and fastening nodes, which enable a variety of hangings, converge into a linear dotted whole, distributed throughout the spaces of this emerging new cultural point.

We removed the physical layers of the former Railway Museum—the peculiar, postmodern foreign bodies left behind—in order to reveal the original materiality. Still, that museum’s focus on transport and infrastructure inspired us to think about the programmed environment of new Rupert in terms of design as a transit mode, where we encoded fluidity and architectural elasticity, enabled by a functional and experiential environment.

A non-fixed, processual environment is being created that allows for adaptation. The evolving environment we created actualizes various circumstances, or different splinters of material processes. We believe that, using the established functional display tools, it should constantly change, fill up, and reorganize itself—on both sides of the display window, in the front halls, and in the studios—as tri-functional capsules. If not of mobility, then the infrastructure of variability and change. In this space and on the façade, we tried to encode temporariness. Easily created everyday or artistic scenography can be easily installed and replaced. Whatever does not work, can be easily adapted to other needs or ideas. We sought the kind of flexibility found in a theatre’s black box, production workshops, or a warehouse, but also in a gallery.

Next, we kept the cellar. It is like a mirror image of the house and a necessary addition—a hideout from the Cold War era, located under all of the above-mentioned spaces. We left it as an extremely important unprocessed counterbalance and complement, as if it were the opposite of the transparent environment brought to life on the ground floor. It’s a space where any rough, coarse, warm, or loud expression is possible, in an unpolished environment. This is a very important component alongside all the other multifunctionality, allowing creative, perhaps spontaneous, forces and threads of an artistic institution to be unleashed.

Finally, it can be said that a space of everyday life was carved out of the rock of the city, from a historic residential building in the Naujamiestis neighborhood. It’s a layered, articulated, autonomous and fluid interior-machine of an art institution, along with an inseparable, unprocessed functional subconscious space at its base.

IG: 

I was pleasantly surprised not only by how you uncovered the building’s historical layers, but also by how, along with Rupert’s physical relocation, you also brought along part of its identity, which has long been associated with the forest, and creativity close to nature. What else moved into the new space along with the reused materials?

IXL:
Both versions of Rupert are signified by wide-open eyes—display windows that reveal internal processes broadly and transparently from the outside, while also looking transparently at the surrounding environment. However, there is also a fundamental difference between these versions. While the Valakampiai Rupert (designed by the Audrius Ambrasas architecture studio) was more monumental in its proportions and materiality—a secluded contemporary villa in the shade of idealistic nature, harmoniously integrated into its recreational surroundings; the new Rupert in Naujamiestis is more of a reflection of the noisy, fragmented, and dissonant whirlpool of the city. It’s disjointed, with overlaps, contradictions, the speed of the street, the immediacy of the sidewalk, inviting you to sit down like at a station or bar, or hold on to the railings like at a bus stop, a city showcase, a passing train carriage, or a public bench-tribune. More autonomous inside, but at the same time more integrated, woven into the fabric of other structures.

However, aiming to also introduce continuity, we brought in layers of industrial or reclaimed wood into this layered and technical interior-device. These indirectly but repeatedly convey some of the former recreational warmth and textures in most spaces, as well as the monumentality of the Valakampiai pine forest ‘villa’ from which Rupert moved.

IG:
Creating a home for an institution that is moving closer to city residents, and seeking to open up to the public, while also ensuring the privacy, comfort, and even emotional security of its temporary residents, is a major challenge. How did you manage to overcome it?

IXL:
The answer may lie in the fact that form does not directly follow function, and that the collage-like environment that is created is systematically transformed, fundamentally ergonomic, and enables performativity and change through material and functional flows. On the other hand, we thought of this somewhat labyrinthine, found environment as a future public space where public exchange could take place without restriction. We wanted this to happen to the fullest extent possible. Or, with the help of transformable furniture and various environmental prostheses. For example, the rooms on the courtyard side for exhibitions and presentations can easily and separately be turned into comfortable rooms for work, rest, or sleep. We sought similar transformations by dynamically combining work, exhibition, event and presentation, community or simple meeting functions in the large front spaces. Even the long window sills are designed so that they can be removed and turned into long tables; for example, for educational activities or community feasts. This desired diversity is also reflected in the assemblage-like character of the various pieces of furniture, which is a reflection of several material processes arranged from different times: unretouched reuse, new precise or infrastructural layers, textiles, borrowed and textural exposures. These come together in an environment that seems to have no singular starting or finishing point. However, in the proposed fluidity, we wanted there to be something to hold on to, a certain stability. Next to the uncovered and exposed long-lasting shell of the front space, we expressed this stability most clearly with industrial solid wood furniture, where people will gather. Whether it be the central mosaic-patterned Rupert team table, the dining table in the studio’s public kitchen, the window seating bench-tabletop, et cetera. Of course, we hope that this entire knot will become an active platform for Vilnius’ cultural landscape.

The Invention and Conclusion of the Eye (Excerpt)

from The Invention and Conclusion of the Eye
Toril Johannessen

Mx [ Boop/audio recorder on ] Recording 13.1.3, the invention and conclusion of the eye. Dear *** [ triple star ]. It’s as I expected: the mapping of the history and future of the eye came to support my suppositions. 

First, that all we see we see alone, but all we see will be the same.

Second, that the world you and I live in is overwhelmingly invisible.

Third, that the eye will retreat.

I have one challenge: To describe the future with complete certainty based on the data that are available. I want you to calculate this for me. What is completely clear is that how we see, what we can see, and what we understand by “seeing” are facing radical changes. To form an image of the future of sight, dear ***, we first have to go back to the beginning. The origin of the eye is light: the eye arose from light…

( … )

[ Mx walks away from the window, magpie makes noise, gradually farther away as Mx is walking, audio recorder on, walks and talks ]

Mx Recording 13.4. Eyes are energy-consuming organs. As you know so well yourself, dear ***, not everyone has the need to see. Like the mole in its odd, remarkable appearance, equipped with a pointy or star-shaped nose and large two-thumbed paws; or the small colony of wolf spiders in lava grottoes in Kauai; or the pale pink, eyeless types of the Mexican fresh-water fish Astyanax, or the penis snake, which actually is a salamander. And the termites! In the social order of termites it is only kings, queens, and the reproducing who see, while the majority—soldiers and workers—are eyeless.


Another highly interesting figure is the Demiguise. Immediately striking is its power of making itself unseen. The Demiguise is a wingless flying creature covered by a fine-haired pelt that reflects its surroundings so that it can make itself invisible at will. Even more distinctive is another characteristic the Demiguise has developed. It sees with the help of a particular form of precognition: its visual perception is based on making statistical calculations of the immediate future. Thereby the Demiguise is always a step ahead, and taking one by surprise is no simple task. If anyone should want to do that, it would require acting unpredictably. The precognitive visual perception of the Demiguise is a function of calculations of probability built on existing data. [ starts a quick walk ] With its large round eyes it sees…


[ Mx crashes into table—bang, the water glass breaks on the floor, comes to a stop. ]

Mx …statistics?


[ Sound recorder off, Mx walks and sits down at the desk, types. ]

Mx Sta…statistics…statistical vision… [ types ] What is precognitive vision?


C:// Precognitive vision is the ability to visualize the immediate future based on statistical calculations.


Mx What is foresight?


C:// Foresight is the ability to visualize the immediate future based on… [ processing sound plus error bleep ]

Mx Visualization meaning.


C:// 420. The language-learning system… 


Mx What is visualization?


C:// “Visualization” has two meanings. Meaning number one is representation of an object, a situation, or a set of information in the form of a diagram or another image. Meaning number 2 is the formation of mental images of something actually not visible.  [ Mx starts drawing while listening ]

Mx What is the meaning of the word “sight”?


C:// “Sight” has two meanings. Meaning number 1 is to be able to see. Meaning number 2 is vision, that something is seen in one’s head.


Mx Where does the word “vision” originate?


C:// The word “vision” comes from the Latin word visionem, which in the 11th century meant “the act of sight” or “things that are seen.” Later on the word came to mean “something seen with the help of the power of the imagination or the supernatural,” which meant presence, glance, imagination, dream, or supernatural sight.


Mx Where does the word “visualization” come from?



C:// In the nineteenth century the word “visualization” described a psychological process, that is, the power to form mental images of something that is not actually visible. Starting in the mid 20th century “visualization” primarily came to mean graphic representation, visualization of data, and image reproduction with the help of instrumentation and calculable figures.


[ Audio recorder on, Mx moves around the room while she speaks. ]

Mx Recording 13.5. So then, what is sensed with the eyes when what one sees is the result of statistical calculations, my fine friend ***? The answer must of course be: nothing, because the visual cortex is used for shaping mental images. As you know, dear ***, those of us who are physiologically sighted don’t see with the eyes but with the brain. The current meaning of the concept “sight” or “vision” can mislead us into thinking that the act of seeing deals primarily with the optic apparatus. That’s incorrect. We can see by creating mental images of what otherwise is considered invisible. That brings us to my assumption that the world is in the process of becoming invisible, or more exactly, optically invisible: the data we are surrounded by is not visible to the eye. They do not have a visual form. To try to capture the invisible as an image will therefore be an image of the very method one uses, not of the information itself. So the truest form of translation of vis­ualization of data will be to create mental images that do not resemble anything we can see with the eye.


Concurrently, this Demiguise… [ short pause ]. Improbable events, events that do not resemble anything that has happened before, are invisible to the Demiguise’s precognitive register. The large round eyes never see the present time, but the future based on the past, which means it must be blind to the immediate surroundings, which… Uh… [ Mx steps on the glass fragments on the floor ] Owww… [ fiddles with the sound recorder ]… Erase [ audio recorder off ]

[ Mx picks up the phone and calls (Z). ]

Mx Yeah hi (Z)… It’s me… Sure… have you checked the results of *** via the network?… OK… Just sketch a simple model to begin with…exactly, a model of the development of the complex eye… Mmm, sure, sure… yeah… mmm. OK… I think that… (Z), there’s still a lot of confusion about whether the visual paradigm is done for or not… Uh-huh… A few people, of course, claim we live in a strongly visual time… but that certainly isn’t to say that the sense of sight has hegemony—we live in a time when we relate to unseen and abstract processes with visual user interfaces… Uh-huh, yeah, exactly… a bit like the dream images and the hypnagogic ones that come just before I sleep—they look like images in the windows of a screen—I have to sort of zoom and scroll to see the whole image… Yeah, uh-huh.. .and while I’m thinking, I imagine words and sentences that are edited like in a word-processing program… Uh-huh… You know, the technology of writing has inscribed itself in those of us who read and write… No, listen: The earliest written sources we have, Sumerian clay tablets, weren’t myths or poetry or stories, no, they were notes for billing, where words could be kept in place of goods—barley and cattle—written down because it was information that couldn’t easily be memorized. So written language and literature have origins in accounting procedures and the need to keep orderly numbers. The question is how the digital information will inscribe itself in us. Or how we can inscribe ourselves in it… Which of course is my task to sort out… Regardless… where was I… dream images… When I lie there, conscious, but without control over the images, I see people and situations I’ve never seen before. Where do they come from?… [ rain again ] Fascinating, yes… but of course all these dream images are completely unpredictable and fleeting mental pictures… What I want is predictability! Clear images! That’s where you’re going to have a duty, (Z), to find a logical method for translating information into mental visualizations that can be stabilized and communicated… No, no, not digital retinas, they’re still optically based, that way we’re still where we are… Sure sure yeah… Uh-huh. Yeah yeah yeah. Do it. Send it over. Bye.


[ Audio recorder on, walks over to the window, drums on the window with her fingers, rain, thunder far off, Mx walks and talks. ]

Mx Recording 13.6. As you well know, dear ***, since you’ve listened carefully for a long time to the story of the development of the sense of sight, we are all for the most part blind. The eyes see only a limited spectre of reality, and brains interpret the signals they receive in highly varied ways. Reality doesn’t arrive through the eye. Objectivity is impossible. We are done with that. The sense of sight, like the other senses, is subjective. We’ve accepted this. But: all of these alternative individual points of view now collectively form a thick fog. The immediate becomes the remote, direction impossible to confirm. When objectivity is impossible, we must teach ourselves other ways of seeing, it is said. I’m now starting to intuit what the contours of this new way of seeing may involve.


[ Electricity crackles, light flashes. ]


Mx [ the voice of Mx becomes elated, speaks more quickly, is less controlled ] With the help of abstraction and calculation in… collective?… neural networks we will be able to imagine the world not just as it appears to ourselves, but as we calculate that it must be! The visual cortex will then to an increasing degree be used for perception… or processing, as it’s called today… of numbers. It will be possible for the term “sight” to mean something closer to the earlier meaning of “vision,” namely the ability to form images of something not actually visible.


[ Heavy thunder. Black out: sound off, light off. ]

An excerpt from a manuscript for an audio play performed at Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen, and Stages: Drawing the Curtain, curated by Jenifer Papararo, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, 2017. Originally published by Fillip, with Plug In Editions.

Images from Mindaugo g. 15, June and October 2025

Artists

Meriem Bennani (born in Morocco, based in Brooklyn US) has developed a shape-shifting practice combining films, sculptures, and immersive installations that use humour and critique to analyse contemporary society, its fractured systems, hybrid identities, and the ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. She is currently presenting ‘Sole Crushing’ at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Bennani’s work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, the Renaissance Society, Fondazione Prada, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Julia Stoschek Collection, Fondation Kamel Lazaar, The Kitchen, and CLEARING, among others.

Life on the CAPS (2022) is the final chapter of Meriem Bennani’s eponymous film trilogy, synthesising her research on the histories of island societies, weaving connections to biotechnology and vernacular music. Computer-generated animation grounds the film, supplemented by Bennani’s unique editing techniques, remixing popular forms of video content, including documentaries, science fiction epics, social media reels, music videos, and reality television. CAPS is a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, home to Kamal, the film’s main character. The film portrays Kamal’s transition between places, ages, and bodies; as well as his diasporic experience—the island of CAPS was a former detention camp for ‘illegally’ teleported inhabitants.

Nolan Oswald Dennis (born in Zambia, based in Johannesburg ZA) is a para-disciplinary artist who explores ‘a black consciousness of space’—investigating the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Their work examines the politics of space and time, not site-specifically but ‘system-specifically’—the hidden structures that shape social, political, and spiritual imaginaries. They use diagrams, drawings, models, maps, and objects in ways that recombine social, technical, political, and spiritual systems, grounded in issues of landlessness, memory, colonial histories, and the intersection of Black, Indigenous, queer, and liberation frameworks. Recent shows include Gasworks in London, the Swiss Institute in New York, Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, and Kunstinsituut Melly in Rotterdam. Dennis was recently a resident artist at NTU CCA Singapore and the Delfina Foundation in London.

The wall diagram recurse 4 a late planet (lush) (2024–) incorporates African fractal geometries, mathematical abstractions, astronomical symbols, and lyrical annotations to reflect on the systemic logics that reproduce social hierarchies and exclusions throughout the world. The diagram is part of overturns, a larger series where Dennis interprets the research of Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter, and her proposed break from Western epistemology in favor of a new scientific framework fusing the natural sciences and humanities. Pushing Wynter’s theories further, Dennis developed the concept of planetary genders, challenging the modern definition of Earth as a uniform, transparent, and accessible entity, mediated by the property claims of racist capital.

throwers (2025–) originates in Dennis’ personal archive of people throwing rocks. Throwing symbolizes society’s latent potential energy in response to economics, politics, and history. It also refers to stone archives, commonly found around the world. Every rock is connected to a social memory, a historic act, or the geological uniqueness of a location. The throwers archive grows with every exhibition and presentation. In this version, it includes rocks found around Rupert’s former and current locations.

99942 Aphosis (2024) portrays a real danger spotted by astronomers. The asteroid Aphosis was classified as a serious threat to Earth when first discovered, and scientists projected a catastrophic impact in 2029. The asteroid’s name comes from the Ancient Greek transliteration of Apop, an ancient Egyptian serpent deity representing chaos and disorder, and sometimes known as the enemy of Ra, the god of light. The letters PHO also refer to the astronomical category ‘Potential Hazardous Object’, linking to Dennis’ practice of connecting seemingly distant fragments from lost cosmologies and modern science.

Donna Marcus Duke (born in the UK, based in London UK) is an award-winning writer, performer, and curator. They were a member of Rupert’s 2024 Alternative Education Programme cohort. Donna is currently a Visiting Scholar in Life Writing at the University of Oxford, and a curatorial research assistant at Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles US. They contributed essays on queer and trans art culture and politics to Frieze, I-D, Vogue Italia, Dazed, 3AM, Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers Publishing, and UCL Press. They have lectured and hosted talks at the University of Oxford, the Institute of Contemporary Art (London UK), the Royal College of Art, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Donna is currently developing her debut novel, Cult Trans, exploring faith and spirituality in contemporary trans discourse.

Rupert is proud to announce that in the context of the opening programme at Mindaugo 15, our institution was the recipient of a grant from The Duke Foundation for Future Research Arts Under Duress. This is a philanthropic initiative founded by Donna Marcus Duke, whose seed funding originated in her 2024 Nobel Foundation award, recognising institutions that share a vision in the technology of delusion. With many thanks to the Duke and the Nobel Foundations’ donors, Rupert was able to pursue its relocation plans, providing urgent security for artists’ research. On the occasion of the opening ceremony, Duke will install a commemorative plaque recognising this generous gift.

Toril Johannessen (born in Norway, based in Bergen NO) works across diverse media, including prints, textiles, and installations. Her artistic work ranges from research-based and systematic information collections to sensuous expressions of form and material. Johannessen’s visual language often depicts seemingly sober, representative documentary forms, such as maps, graphs, and diagrams. Alternating between methodological precision and emotive strategies, she aims to highlight how values and subjectivity affect the presentation of facts and information. Johannesson’s exhibitions include solo presentations at Tromsø Kunstforening, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, and the Hordaland Art Centre. She also contributed to Survival Kit 15 at LCCA in Riga LV, Radius CCA in Delft NL, WIELS in Brussels BE, and Documenta 13 in Kassel DE.

Imaginary Networks (2015–2022) is an ongoing series of diagrams that map the artist’s understanding of her changing social and technological experiences over the decades, following her first introduction to a computer. With the annotated diagrams, loosely based on her fragile memories, Johannessen illustrates the correlation between the enormous leaps in applied science and computing over her lifetime, and how this shift in manufactured electronic devices affected human neuroplasticity and behavioural patterns. The familiar language of colorful infographics and popular science communication playfully—and starkly—show the impact of digitalisation on daily life, global society, and the human capacity for imagination. The project originates from correspondence between the artist and Dr Bruce Wexler, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, and their dialogues on the ways their research practices both relate and diverge.

Gosia Lehmann (born in Poland, based in Berlin DE) is an artist in transit. Traversing between disciplines—including film, performance, and scenography—she interprets the narrative constructions that rule society and creates multimedia spaces that accentuate its prevailing and continually emerging socioeconomic phenomena. Her practice reflects the dominance of technology and data governance, where the boundaries between truth and fiction are blurry. In 2019, Lehmann initiated and co-founded the artist alliance Lagoon Parliament, providing an independent art production framework that challenges hierarchical conventions. She’s also a co-founder of Solaris Space, Berlin. Lehmann was a Rupert residency programme participant in 2024.

Dilemma creates a situation in which one is forced to choose between two equally unpleasant options. The labyrinthine installation, shaped around Rupert’s new facility, presents visitors with branching decision paths. Led by an arrow-shaped audio guide, Lehmann invites participants to navigate a formidable puzzle composed of the remnants that contemporary economics leave behind. The paths begin with the flip of a coin, and lead to a series of objects that allude to the paradoxes of offshore money—what Lehmann calls ‘the black magic of the financial world, or economic shamanism’. Her playful examination of global finance’s legally evasive grey zone stresses the real impact these supposed abstractions have on individual lives.

Hanne Lippard (born in the UK, based in Berlin DE) has used language as her raw material for over a decade, processing it in diverse forms—as texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects, and sculpture. Lippard intertwines found text with her own material, which she manipulates through a variety of devices, such as repetition, the shifting of intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, in order to formulate musings on contemporary life. Her work’s themes draw upon questions of bodily and mental well-being, self-optimization, and living through the lens of social media. By consciously picking at the seams of her found and fabricated texts, Lippard makes us acutely aware of the fragility of language as a tool for conveying meaning and sense. She has recently presented work at Mudam Luxembourg, Haus der Kunst, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, HKW Berlin, Halle Nord in Geneva, CCA Berlin, and won the 2024 Preis der Nationalgalerie.

The immersive sound installation The Myths and Realities of Achieving Financial Independence (2013) is an elaborate play with language, challenging social and economic themes with an exuberant, feminine energy. Lippard acts as a forensic linguist, examining the character of ‘she’ from the well-known tongue twister, “She sells seashells on the seashore.” By repeating the phrase, making mistakes, and branching into new narratives, Lippard begins to question everything about the situation: who ‘she’ is, why ‘she’ is selling, and even where these events are happening. The fable becomes hazy, and the identities of the characters shift, as a new cosmology forms in relation to the sea. ‘She’ eventually loses her assets and becomes a fossil herself. What starts as a simple word game morphs into an absurd and dark story, one familiar to many women. The dream of ‘She’s’ independence and autonomy, and the promise of the labor-capital relationship, eventually falls apart—leading to debt, foreclosure, and disappointment.

The curtains My answers, below in blue (2021) float in Rupert’s main space, facing the street and addressing the public. They depict sticky notes placed in the clouds, bearing heartfelt but cryptic messages—‘I Miss My Strangers as Much as My Friends’ and ‘T’aime and Space’. First commissioned as a series for Lippard’s exhibition Contact Mood Share at M HKA Antwerp, it continues her study of linguistic semiotics, changes of meaning, and social context. The phrases emerge out of the writer’s perceived isolation, expressing wistful feelings of lost connections with the passage of time.

Justina Mykolaitytė (born in Lithuania, based in Vilnius LT) is a performer, singer, and film, theatre, and voice actress from Lithuania. Her practice also covers interdisciplinary projects, visual arts, performance art, baroque opera singing, and hosting the radio show Vox vulgaris on Radio Vilnius. She additionally works in the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius as a director’s assistant and as a casting director for commercial and film projects.

Ieva Rižė (born in Lithuania, based in Vilnius LT) is an interdisciplinary artist with a BA in Monumental Painting and Scenography and an MA in Contemporary Sculpture. Rižė was a member of Rupert’s 2024 Alternative Education Programme cohort. Originating in a painting practice, she soon expanded into dimensional motifs, sculptural installations, and performance. Rižė was a member of the Butoh movement, joining the physical theatre troupe Okarukas from 2016 to 2018. Her work explores the human psyche, temporality, group dynamics, identity, and power. Rižė uses poetics, symbols, textual performativity, and the interaction of bodies with the environment in her creative approach. Recently, this has focused on ‘in-between’ space—the distance between inanimate substances, life forms, and concepts—exploring the dependencies and tensions that describe a story.

imagine GOAT talking: V (2025) is a new performance in a series, based on Rižė’s dystopic poem of the same name. Goats rapidly adapt to changing environments, and frequently appear as symbols in religious or mythological contexts. Rižė’s goat characters are futuristic chimeras that play on those bestial and allegorical associations, endlessly morphing between dualities—heroism and despair, energy and fatigue, feral and domesticated, superpower and vulnerability. In this expanded version of Rižė’s performance, a herd of these goats will echo throughout Rupert’s new building, scaling its concrete cliffs and surveying its unfamiliar territories.

___

Nuova Orfeo (based in Palermo IT) is a not-for-profit initiative dedicated to experimental film, sound, and performance, rooted in Palermo but operating transnationally through a feminist, polyphonic, and radically inclusive lens. Its programmes reactivate forgotten or overlooked spaces and histories, bringing them into resonance with contemporary explorations of identity, myth, memory, and embodiment. Nuova Orfeo takes its name from Palermo’s last remaining porn cinema as a symbol of the city’s cultural rebirth—this time in a feminist, polyphonic, and radically inclusive key. Founded in 2021 by Beatrice Gibson, Flora Pitrolo, and Pietro Airoldi, the collective currently consists of Beatrice Gibson, Stella Sideli, and Beatrice Zerbato, with music programmed by Michel Libera and Mario Adamo.

Nuova Orfeo’s intervention at the inauguration of Rupert’s renovated facility echoes the programme of its own first event, Orfeo on the Beach, which revived a disused open-air cinema on Palermo’s urban seaside. It examined return and renewal, connecting feminist independent cinema to reimagining neglected cultural infrastructure. Along with a presentation on their collective’s roots, Nuova Orfeo chose the films Errore di gruppo (1973) by Karma Film, featuring the Italian poet Patrizia Vicinelli, and We Had the Experience but Missed the Meaning (2014) by Laida Lertxundi. Like the institution, both films are connected by vocal and visual poetics challenging narrative structure and opening spaces for new forms of experience and meaning.

We Had the Experience but Missed the Meaning (2014) is a film by Laida Lertxundi set between Los Angeles and San Diego, crossing between desert and sea, screen and page. It interprets part of ‘All Men Are the Same’ by the writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, following a man who prefers driving to making love.

Laida Lertxundi (born in Spain, based in Paris FR) is an artist and filmmaker. She explores the parallels between landscape and body through ‘Landscape Plus’: collaborative, improvised gestures and a deconstruction of traditional film hierarchies. Combining conceptual rigor with sensual pleasure, her films situate collectivity in natural environments, attending to regional idioms and traditions. She has shown at MoMA New York, Tate Modern, and the Whitney Biennial, and in the collections of the Museo Reina Sofía and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Lertxundi is a Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

Errore di Gruppo (1973) was produced by Karma Film, a collective founded by Elio Rumma, Mario Gianni, and Patrizia Vicinelli. It follows Vicinelli wandering through the streets of Lourdes, carrying a weapon. The words are by Vicinelli and drawn from her poetic explorations. In November 2024, Nuova Orfeo presented this work as part of Italo–feminisms, their series revisiting female figures of 1970s Italian avant-garde cinema; reintroducing them into contemporary discourse through conversations, readings, and publishing.

Patrizia Vicinelli (born in Italy, 1943-1991) was a prolific filmmaker and a prominent figure of the Italian feminist avant-garde. Difficult to define, Vicinelli’s practice resonates with Adriano Spatola’s concept of ‘total poetry’: visual, gestural, phonetic, and literary. She breaks language away from a communicative purpose to become pure expression. She collaborated with the central artists, writers, and filmmakers of the era, including Emilio Villa and Aldo Braibanti, Gruppo 63, Alberto Grifi, Gianni Castagnoli, and Mario Gianni.

Architecture, Design, and Development

Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture (IXL) was founded by architects Petras Išora and Ona Lozuraitytė in 2014 in Vilnius.​ ​The creative duo exercise a cooperative practice, linking the spheres of architecture, public space, infrastructure, design, art, ecology, landscape, and environments of display. IXL Studio participated in numerous interdisciplinary collaborations at different scales, nationally and internationally, in dialogue with other practices within the field of art and architecture. Their creative practice integrates urban narratives, public spaces, landscapes, infrastructures, domestic environments, social and cultural connections, and material flows. They experiment with  matter in scales of exhibition, interior design, public furniture, and architecture of the wider environment. Focusing on material experimentation and contextual analysis, IXL explore architectural concepts that foster sustainable, dialogical, and unique environments.  Išora and Lozuraitytė are the architects behind Rupert’s new facility at Mindaugo 15.

Jana Sofie Liebe and Augustinas Milkus (based in Zurich CH and Amsterdam NL) are graphic designers. Working independently and in collaboration, their practices revolve around print, images, and the modes of their production and circulation. They have previously collaborated with artists and institutions across the cultural fields of Georgia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They are Rupert’s identity designers since September 2025.

Lukas Mykolaitis (born in Lithuania, based in Kaunas LT) often begins his creative work with photography, but expands into various interdisciplinary modes of expression, incorporating strategies of artistic research, image collection, and curation. His artistic work is grounded in the concept of slow time, focusing on observation, the analysis of image perception, the alteration of contexts, and the formation of unexpected connections. His projects explore the intricate labyrinths of personal and collective memory, blurring the line between life and research. Mykolaitis has worked periodically as a photographer with Rupert over the last five years, and is a director of the Institute of Heritage (Paveldo Institutas) in Kaunas.

Darius Žakaitis is the founder of Rupert, the director and one of the founders of Vilnius Technology and Art Centre, and a partner of the Contrarian Ventures Foundation. Žakaitis has been actively creating and investing in the Lithuanian start-up ecosystem for more than 10 years. A large part of his current work is focused on the development of opportunities for young businesses in Lithuania.