ArchiTextura: Invisible & Similar

Opening of the exhibition on October 28 from 18:00 to 21:00

October 29-30 exhibition visiting hours from 10:00 to 18:00

-visiting the exhibition is free-

From October 28th to October 30th the joint exhibition of tactile architecture “Invisible & Similar” by architects and artists Tomomi Homma (Japan) and Rasa Chmieliauskaitė is presented at the temporary Architecture Center in the former Kaunas Central Post Office.

This exhibition is part of the project “ArchiTextura: Invisible & Similar”, a cross-cultural non-visual architectural residency held in October. During the architectural study, the project’s resident from Japan Tomomi Homma (本間智美) together with architect Rasa Chmieliauskaitė and curator of the residency dr. Justinas Kalinauskas delved into the country’s ethnic architecture tradition during their trips to the ethnographic villages of Lithuania where they researched the principles of environmental organization, spatial logic, and the material specificity of wooden construction, which in the exhibition is compared to the Japanese tradition, in search of a universal architectural grammar that reflects both cultures, revealing itself not visually, but through other senses: touch, smell, and hearing.

Tomomi Homma (本間智美) is an architect, artist, and producer from the city of Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture. In her work, the phenomenon of memory and the conceptual design of public space are harmoniously combined. An important motif in the artist’s projects is elements of traditional Japanese culture, which she integrates through an instinctive process that highlights the importance of the local population and community in the environment. Such spatial-anthropological relations between the (architectural) environment and the community are considered by Tomomi Homma as a four-dimensional space.

Rasa Chmieliauskaitė is an architect and artist from Kaunas, who for the past four years has been working on non-visual architectural cognitive research, in which she involves the community of the Lithuanian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired, looking for new forms of dialogue with the environment around us, which dictate new possibilities for organizing space and a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of architecture.

Project team:

Exhibition curator: dr. Justinas Kalinauskas

Artists: Tomomi Homma (本間智美), Rasa Chmieliauskaitė

Videographer: Mikas Zabulionis

Sound artist: Arnas Mikalkėnas

Designer: Inga Navickaitė-Drąsutė

The project is being prepared by ArchiTextura LAB and the Kaunas Artists’ House.

The sponsors of the project are the Lithuanian Council for Culture and EU-Japan Fest.

Project partners: Kaunas branch of the Lithuanian Union of Architects, Lithuanian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired, Kaunas – European Capital of Culture 2022.