Dorota Gawęda: We’re an artist duo, we started working together in 2013 and we work in a variety of media, but performance is the core of our practice. Eglė Kulbokaitė: Performance and text. We work a lot with our extended project Young Girl Reading Group that started as a reading group in Berlin in 2013 and continued as a casual reading group, but then growing into more performative settings, installations, etc. We work a lot like in collaborative ways, like from the … it’s the core of our practice I guess, since there’s is two of us. So, I think like we’re interested in kind of blurring this kind of authorship, as like a solo artist notion. Yeah. And then like we share a lot of responsibilities with people that we work with. And then they influence the work a lot. I think the people that are part of it, that are performing our pieces. (D.G.): Yes, our performances are based on that very loose kind of scripting. They don’t have a defined choreography but there is like a … somehow they develop more within a workshop structure, so all the people, that become the readers, they also somehow become the choreographers too, because they somehow together, within this group dynamic, invent the movement and how the performance will develop from iteration to iteration, it varies and differs. It somehow … I guess, it’s more interesting for us to … to think of a work that is not so rigid within its frame. It’s more moldable and it can change also through time. (E.K.): Yeah, so we eh call it like reading group, so it’s a group or a community of people that like share the ideas. And this group is constantly growing, like year by year we feel. In its origins, Young Girl Reading Group was a reading group. So, we started it in Berlin and we ran it on a weekly basis from our home. We would meet every Sunday and then kind of select texts that would be read each week. In the same time, we tried to promote it as an event. Something maybe quite attractive seemingly, but in the end, it was a very casual meeting that was open to anyone who was interested in a given text in a kind of- a nonacademic way of sharing that text. And I guess, it’s- it just kind of started developing from there, like both, in the location of the reading which was at the time Berlin, and then also online, where we always kind of post what we were going to read, so we shared the texts. And that kind of opened a conversation as well. We met at the … in London, at Royal College of Art, like we were doing our masters, both of us. I did masters in curating, but you did it in Visual Communications. And I guess like it’s coming a bit like -or maybe I’m coming more from theoretical kind of background anyways. So, maybe that influenced like the interest in text, I guess. (D.G.): Yeah, I guess, but it’s also just like the experience of the university, like art education, it had an influence on us, setting up Young Girl Reading Group in the first place, because it just felt, like we need to make our own space to share certain texts that were not covered, I think. I guess, we really felt that something was lacking in the education that we really needed to relearn. That’s why like kind of to self-educate a bit afterwards. So, that’s why we started this reading group.
