The 22nd International Glyptographic Conference of CIRG (Centre Internationale de Recherche Glyptographique), successfully took place on 10-14 October 2022, in Larnaca at the Phivos Stavrides Foundation, organised and coordinated by STARC’s and APAC Labs’ researchers.

The conference brought together 27 speakers from 6 countries presenting their research on masons’ marks, stone working techniques and graffiti. The presentations highlighted the relevance of this material for the study of past building processes and techniques (masons’ marks), for the use and perception of our historic buildings and the everyday life graphic expression recorded in graffiti.

STARC and APAC Labs’ researchers participated in the Conference with three presentations including by the Interim Director of STARC, Prof. Michel Menu, CyI Associate Research Scientist, Dr Mia Trentin, and PhD Student / Graduate Research Assistant Valentina Vassallo stressing the state-of-the-art study and digital approach carried on by STARC in the field of graffiti studies, epigraphy and art sculptures.

STARC and APAC Labs confirmed its commitment and efforts in developing new digital technologies while promoting the study and knowledge of this peculiar graphic heritage.

The CIRG was born in 1979 in Belgium (Braine-le-Château) as lapidary signs are present everywhere in the world, but their study were nearly inexistent because of lack of adapted tools. It was urgent to constitute a research group as international as possible and to allow regular confrontation of research results. The CIRG aims not only spread the word and develop classifying methodological tools, and at the same time of the precise terminology, but also create a repository of data at the disposal of the historians, the art-historians, the architects, restorers, ethnologists, epigraphists, and archaeologists, and lay the foundations of the publishing of a corpus for lapidary signs.