Le Chantier: portrait of artist
Eliza Olkinitskaya

For nearly six months now, nine artists whose approaches stem from print and photography are completing a collective research and creation residency at L’imprimerie as part of Le Chantier research project on the printed and photographic image. Utilizing the centre’s facilities allowed them to develop their personal projects while taking part in group reflection and exploration.

Aside from their work in the studio, these nine creators are currently presenting the result of their experiments to the public at the maison de la Culture Maisonneuve until November 28. L’imprimerie invites visitors to come and discover these projects throughout the exhibition.

Eliza Olkinitskaya

During her creation residency for Le Chantier – Research project on the printed and photographic image, artist Eliza Olkinitskaya has carried out two research projects that—although dissimilar in their style—overlap in their slow temporality and inherent materialness.

Forgotten inks

The project began as a purely experimental study, determined by the artist’s daily life in the studio. Sorting out old jars of lithographic printing ink, she opened them one by one to discover substances of various consistency, both dormant and effervescent. Thickness, degradation, pigment density; all these captivating surfaces were digitized and printed by Eliza. At once enigmatic and unambiguously material, these works bring us right back to the origin of analogue printing in art.

Analogue places

Alongside this project, the artist has conducted research aimed at finding the point of convergence between printed arts and the moving image through analogue systems. By creating folioscopes (or flip books), Eliza builds moving images from her strolls through the streets of Montreal, Moscow and Málaga. As she spent many hours observing, sketching and photographing areas that bear the trace of a “change in pace” in the way they interact with the city, she focused on places that had no commercial purpose, and whose very existence depend on citizens volunteering their time to care for them. And so, Moscow’s dovecotes and Spain’s rooftops now unfold into three lithographed flipbooks all marked by a slow temporality and a repetitive and ritualistic creation process, like cobbled together, timeless snapshots.


We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for this project.

© L’imprimerie, centre d’artistes, 2024