Lithopolis is a book of 30 pages comprised of images of the various stones in Graz. Text about the our geological relationship to cities is broken up with images of stones.
“The city is a Stone Age technology, made over with metal and information.”
I printed the book at Risograd, a community studio within Schaumbad, located just off the main lobby. Once a week, they were open to the public, or their public, of zinesters and book artists. The studio was directed by Martin Trollman and Hanna Stein. The first day I was there, an artist from Serbia, who had a just acquired his own Riso, was printing Christmas cards of Jesus, using gold ink. It drew an international crowd.
Riso is a technology that is like letterpress, in that paper is rolled over an inked surface, only the plate is created using a mask that can be digitally burnt. Each drum is a single color and in order to create multiple colors, a page must be run through the machine multiple times. The machine looks like a copy machine. Risograd has four machines, two of which partially work, but complementary to each other. Riso produces a rasterized image, not a photographic duplicate, and, because I printed each page in a single tone, the images of rocks look more like textures than photos, but I liked the aesthetic.
The first day at Risograd I printed my book for about six hours. The title page is black with gold ink; the following pages white with black ink; a few central pages with only stone and no text are black with gold ink; the colophon page is again black with gold ink. In a cross-section view, the book looks layered like geologic structure. For the cover and back, I ordered stone paper made of rock minerals and plastic; it appears like vellum and is waterproof and semi-transparent. I learned about changing the drums, the peculiarities such as multiple pages being picked up by the machine at the same time, meaning the bottom page isn’t printed on. The second day I just trimmed two of the four sides of the pages in order to reduce the size and weight of the paper for travel.
Printing thirty copies cost about 120 € plus a donation. Martin framed the donation as “pay whatever you can; some people pay 5€ and some pay 100€.” I had no idea what this meant in terms of money, so prior to picking up the book, I asked Iris what she suggested: 20€. I paid a total of 150€, or 29€ but Martin said, “If that’s good for you, it’s good for us.” What? I got the sense he was scoffing at my donation, but I said ‘fuck it: if they expected a precise, larger amount, they should have suggested a percentage rather than quantity in previous donations.’
The other strange request was not only a copy of the book for the archive, which at first I was confused as to whether they expected me to pay (ultimately Martin clarified that they did not expect me to pay for it) but a second “finished and bound copy” which I was supposed to donate, again for the archive. I guess this was because I didn’t have time nor materials necessary to finish book while in Graz. I thought it was strange for a community center to request a copy for their archive without sponsoring the production of the work. I sponsored it by paying for it. Archival donations are very common in residency programs, or organizations that may use the works to raise funds, but Martin specified that they do not sell their archive.
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I met Simon Žlahtič, a curator at Guest Room Maribor in Slovenia, at Cafe Mitte to talk about art, ecology, and the possibility of working together. Maribor had a sister-city relationship between Graz, Lebanon and Serbia; Simon spent lots of time with the artists at Schaumbad. Guest Room Maribor also has a residency program, similar to Das Land Steiermark, which included housing and a stipend.[1] They shared similar interests. Simon told me about a project that they launched in storefront windows to educate the local community about the use of pristine land in Maribor for an industrial plant. The project against which they were protesting had similar aspects to the construction of the Speicherkanal: secret, early planning stages between government and industry; environmental degradation for the benefit of a private company; and the government incentivization based on the promise of jobs and tax money.
We talked for about 90 minutes when Ana, Simon’s partner, arrived to pick up Simon. Simon asked if I would be willing to share my video with him for a screening at Maribor. I agreed, but noted that, like my meeting with Werner Sprung, it seemed that the purpose of the meeting was quite delayed.
[1]Guest Room Maribor http://www.guestroommaribor.si/?fbclid=IwAR3m8dgFG1P2m5lW0r5rwVGpIgidsGVRExbpbI0O76y6Pjmj1UPtiFC2NS0