157 x 204mm, 102 pages, Colour printing, Hand sewn, Softcover, Ed. of 200, 2022

Someone was singing, but who? The beach was deserted. But the voice was there… Now near. Now far. Then it seemed to come from the sea, an inlet among the rocks, many rocks that... looked...like hills of flesh" — in this excerpt, as in other pages of the book, the artists Martijn in ’t Veld, Darren Barrett and Marija Repšytė have written texts in response to the students’ drawings from Vilnius Justinas Vienožinskis Art School. Children between the ages of 10 and 14 were asked to draw how they see the town, the one they live in, and how they see Vilnius. Is this city the product of their imagination or just the result of somebody else’s production?

In the end, it is not a question of how accurately they drew the streets of their city, but of how they see it personally, experience it, how they imagine and recreate it through their drawings. In the book Martijn, Darren and Marija ask: what could have happened in these drawings, or what can still happen? What do we see in the drawings and how can we interpret them? What can we “do with a city”, imagine the city to be a person, ‘a lover’ perhaps, with whom you are in relationship with?

In the book you will not find drawings by students from art school, but instead the drawings from the childhoods of artists Karin Nordgren, Kipras Dubauskas, David Bernstein, Algimantas Rokas Černiauskas, Roos Wijma, and the drawings by artist Augustinas Savickas, when he was 84 and he drew his childhood and the white nights which he spent in Scandinavia.

It is a book about the moments of imagination while travelling without leaving a place. About how we choose where to go, with whom, what we hear and smell, even if we are in the same room, just in different countries. Holding any tangible map — “the real map already exists in one’s head”.

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