Page Not Found proudly presents the fifth chapter of Open Letters. The project invites The Hague artists to occupy our large storefront window with messages of urgency and vulnerability. 

Artist and designer Matas Buckus shares two selected graphic interpretations of Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World”. Produced manually with leftover pieces of adhesive vinyl and Dymo labels, the two selected compositions were scanned and vectorized, without excessive refinement, to be displayed at a larger scale. 

The eco-systems of earth are slowly but surely collapsing. As citizens, we have minimal control over the factors which affect the environment the most. Facing that fact, are there mind-sets we could inhabit in order to help balance our relentless human impact on planet earth? 

The use of contemporary technology in graphic design has exponentially grown in the past years, but has this been solely beneficial? Can we admit that anything viewed on our screens is technically not ‘real’, a composition of microscopic pixels, replicating and imitating images and principles of the real world? This seemingly non-existent distance between the human and the machine can be distracting, especially in the design process, simulating perfection that can easily be obsessed over.

During the unveiling of this Open Letter, Matas will briefly share his thoughts on embracing our human imperfections during the design process (concentrating on typography) and how it can be a way to balance our interactions with machines and materiality. 

This Open Letter will be unveiled on Friday 10 December at 16:00, and will be exhibited for the duration of a month.

Open Letters are freely accessible from the street at any time.

Page Not Found and the Reading Room are happy to invite you to a two-part online reading session around ‘repair’, with Cristina Cochior, amy pickles and Joana Chicau of Varia.

In this Reading Room session we will consider the modes in which our bodies interact with, are perceived by and operate through, with and against everyday communication technologies. This collective work will be carried out on an Etherpad, an open-source, web-based collaborative editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document and see all of the participants’ edits in real-time. What intimate relations are bound within our screens and machines? What does our body learn while flowing in these zones?

As a group we will look into practices of “annotating” text. We will make digital annotations as we read, digesting the words while we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up meanings and take notes, making the text more accessible to the next person who encounters it. By creating new modes of accessing and countering text, reading together becomes a continuous re-reading.

The thoughts central to this reparative reading session are formed by scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In the essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You”, Sedgwick tells us that rearranging what we read can be a form of sustenance. Through sharing our differences in what is nourishing, we hope to recognise the limits of what can be read and what can be repaired.

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. 

Cristina Cochior is a Rotterdam-based researcher and designer. Her work revolves around situated feminist software, affective archival interfaces, digital infrapunctures, vernacular language processing and digital knowledge organisation and transmission. Together with other members of Varia, she works on collective, non-extractive digital infrastructures.

amy pickles is an artist and loosely formed educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution (of knowledge, tools, finances) and collaboration are methodologies to refuse individual ownership.

Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance — currently based in London. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

This online session takes place in two parts: the first part from 14:30-16:30 and the second part from 17:00-19:00. Participants can choose to attend one or both parts of the session.

While a small introduction will be held over Zoom, the session itself does not take place through video-call but through the interactive Etherpad document. 

Texts for this session will be provided in the moment and there is no need for reading in advance.

Please confirm your attendance for one or both parts of the session by sending an email to register@page-not-found.nl.

We are happy to invite you to an afternoon launch celebrating the new book ”Koen Taselaar. Rollable Ramblings.”

During the launch Taselaar will also present a special edition commissioned by Page Not Found. Discover this jacquard-woven feline story, wear it as a bookmark, use it as a scarf or wrap it around your whiskers. Our favorite gift idea for this season!

The work of Koen Taselaar is a unique universe in which only he determines the rules. He makes skilful drawings, but also clumsy ceramics and elaborate tapestries. Taselaar’s visual language emerged from the grey area in which text is not only meaning but also form. He expresses this in drawn puns, imaginary record sleeves or large psychedelic paintings.

”Koen Taselaar. Rollable Ramblings” is the first comprehensive publication on the artist’s textile work. The majority of Rollable Ramblings comprises reproductions of his tapestries, and zoom-ins on them. This visual component is complemented with essays shedding light on the works, and on the history of textile art in general, written by art critic Katalin Herzog. The book was made in collaboration with Textiellab, the professional workshop of the TextielMuseum.

In September of 2020 Taselaar presented the solo show ‘Opinionated Aquarium’ at Page Not Found, where some of the tapestries seen in the book were first revealed to the public.

Launch starts at 15:00.

Throughout the last weeks of December we present a mini-exhibition with publications made by kids during the Page of Possibilities workshops in 2021. 

The Page of Possibilities workshops introduced children (ages 4-12) in a playful manner to the practice of self-publishing. They discovered the colourful and creative world of artist books and learned how to make their own small publication. 

Page of Possibilities was inspired by the pedagogics of Célestin Freinet, who started the l’École Moderne in France in 1947. In his modern schools the emphasis was on children-led education: a printing press was placed in the middle of the school and children shared their experiences and thoughts via self-made books and pamphlets. 

The works will be showcased in the window of our bookshop at Boekhorststraat 126 until 7 January 2022. You can pass by to view them from the street whenever you like.