During the three-month-long residency period from January to April 2025, TYPA was joined by artists Mimma and Mira, who both led individual creative projects.
Artist and architect Mimma Tuomisalo produced a publication “Koristaja” using TYPA’s letterpress and bookbinding facilities.
Mimma is particularly drawn to exploring verbal methods in visual forms — and vice versa. Based on her lecture performance, the text in the publication “Koristaja” combines the themes of architectural ornamentation, building maintenance, and demolition. Koristaja, an Estonian word for “a cleaner”, is directly translated in Finnish as “a decorator.”
“Koristaja” is partially hand-composed using ornamental types from TYPA’s archives and partially made with master technician @jorgenloot and the hot metal Monotype caster. As the essayistic short story discusses architecture’s relationship with value, effort, and beauty, the means of getting the text onto paper deal with these very same questions through its low-tech production, where mistakes and adaptations are easily made.
In the exhibition “Strange Familiar,” alongside the “Koristaja” publication, Mimma made aquarelle monotype prints as a quickly and intuitively crafted parallel to the letterpress’s precise system. The subjects of the prints vary: in “Koristaja,” devils are shown to be a surprisingly common subject in façade decorations and frequent visitors in printshops, whereas babies, horses, and gingerbread have played a role in influential historical argumentation against architectural ornamentation.
Mira Vornanen, made these observations from the residency.
“Estonia is close to my home country Finland, but some things are still different. It was wonderful to observe nature and listen to a language that is almost like mine, but still not quite.
The exhibition Strange Familiar tells about my experience through photography, cyanotype and linen paper made in Typa. The exhibition is shared with Mimma Tuomisalo @mim___ma, who was in residency at the same time. In addition to the joint residency period, we share a common homeland and we have both graduated from printmaking department of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki.
I appreciate the versatility of Typa. Considering the paper and letterpress museum as a living museum allows for the preservation of the skills needed to keep the old equipment alive in addition to the tools. There is a lot going on at Typa, there are workshops, visiting groups, research and museum tours. The residency program allows artists to get to know the place and work with tools and machines that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to access.”
Mimma and Mira’s residency was supported by the Nordic-Baltic Funding for artist residencies, from The Nordic Culture Point.