Psychogeography: Scetches/Excerpts
Installation. Photographs, printed SMS messages. 2009

Psycho-geography was the first project that Lipšic initiated during the MigAA Transgression Laboratory in Berlin. It was supposed to continue during all the labs, and actually it did, although it changed its name. In the end, Lipšic decided that everything is psycho-geography.

The project consists of two parts — the first was a sequence of SMS messages sent home to Lithuania while traveling. Each one is stamped with the time and date when they were sent — time then became the subject matter and indicator for this particular psycho-geographical mapping. The second part was a sequence of photographs taken in Lipschitzallee, Berlin. Her surname in German is Lipschitz (Lipšic is the Lithuanian equivalent), so this particular documentation process was personally important. She believes that running across one’s own names in a public place and on a sign causes a certain kind of feeling. In her situation, the expedition to her name-sake street became more like a bad dream in the outskirts of Berlin.

Monika Lipšic was born in 1988 in Birmingham, Alabama, in the south of the United States. At the age of 12 she began competing in surfing sports in the swimming pool. She excelled at this, but in 2006 in a championship in Lithuania, she was attacked and severely injured by a shark. She stayed there to proceed with a number of urgent operations. She lost her hope in life at that point. Later that year, she fell in love with her plastic surgeon and decided to stay in Lithuania permanently. The shark attack changed her life fundamentally and she never again went surfing. She gained great mystical wisdom and abilities and as a consequence, decided to study art history, theory, and critique at VDA beginning in 2007.