KAUSAAL Living Bookshop

Kausaal is a pop-up bookshop that is open only one day at a time, inviting visitors to co-activate and co-create the space by participating in its events

  • Supported by Estonian Ministry of Culture and Tallinn City

Kausaal is a pop-up bookshop that is open only one day at a time, inviting visitors to co-activate and co-create the space by participating in its events. Events and happenings in Kausaal vary from discussions and collective readings to digital writing experiments and reading games.

The thematic focus is different each time, exploring reading or writing as a practice, the spaces for reading, etc. The aim of Kausaal is to introduce both foreign and local experimental writings and offer books about art that are otherwise not available in Estonia. Kausaal is also seeking new ways of writing about performing arts, connecting the latest with the field of literature. Apart from that, at each opening you'll be able to get to know Kausaal closer. Its thoughts, feelings and desires, the reasons behind its choices or their complete absence. Kausaal strives to be an open book itself.

Kausaal #2 already on December 18!

December feels like the month for everyone to be a justified alien, enter the darkness and see it as an unknown amount of potential. Kausaal #2 will focus on shifting forms. The invisible physicality of nature embeddesd in technologies. Networks of social media and how all of it becomes a sort of mycelium. Rocks, going through major changes when no one is looking. And how such metamorphoses are framed through and by books and writing. What is our relation to all of these shifting forms – the unknown unknown? Are writers eager to shift in their writing and bookshop visitors willing to explore it with us?

Schedule (18.12 15.00-22.00)
16:00 Shifting Darkness: performative conversation about form with Alissa Šnaider, Mikk-Mait Kivi, Bohdana Korohod and Heneliis Notton (ENG)
18:00 Talk To Me In Someone Else’s Language: collective reading (ENG)
20:00 Knock-knock, who's in the basement?: performance by Johhan Rosenberg (ENG)
21:00 Tea: just cozy vibes

Kausaal #1 in Kanuti Gildi SAAL on November 13 focused on introductions - moments before diving in. An introduction is something that is followed by a body. An in-between before things get real. How to introduce a bookshop, an event, a meeting-point-to-be? What if we removed all introductions? How does one get into the state of reading? How does one choose a book to commit to? Now, in the era of short attention spans, is the time for long books with heavy paragraphs over? Have the ways of experiencing depth changed?

The idea emerged from SAAL Biennaal where Kanuti Gildi SAAL hosted an artist run bookshop rile*. Together with rile* eˉlektron.signal SAAL Biennaal radio organized a concert and a public live-streamed reading from the bookshop. Now, some months later, Kausaal keeps collaborating with rile*.