elections & t-shirts.

Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013) is a mirrored installation that you have to physically enter - and close the doors to after. It's almost hypnotic and alluring, and the viewer becomes part of the artwork in the mirrors. I think it's fascinating when the artwork actually invites you in.

 I found this video really interesting because of the point it was making - these days people are more interested in art that can guarantee a good photo, rather than a good experience. In all honesty that is very disappointing and disheartening but on the other hand it opens up a whole different possibility of sharing art and its message. Something that is easily accessible and visually pleasing would thereby gain more coverage.

 

This is an older performance & installation that I went to see at the Barbican a few years back but it always comes back to me as it changed my opinion of viewers interaction with the art. It saw multiple rollerskaters and naked dancers move around the venue whilst the viewer could walk around and explore different corners and messages left by the artist. Sometimes the viewer would have to stop and move aside to let the performers get past them. It was strange to see how uncomfortable some people got when the performers were close to them - almost as if they thought they were to become a part of the performance.

I'm interested in that discomfort. How could I make something accessible yet uncomfortable?

My own answer to this question was - location.

At this point I had already gone outside and taken some 'product' photos, and I found it interesting how unusual yet natural they looked at the same time.

It reminded me of shoe tossing, and made me think of how strange it is to see clothing outdoors when it's not actually worn by people.

And so I thought - wouldn't that be an interesting concept for presenting images?

It was actually this, together with my confusion leading up to election month in Latvia that made me decide that I wanted to take portraits of Latvians and Latvian-Russians. I decided that finding three patriotic citizens who displayed Latvian red-white-red flags in their cars and three Latvian-Russians who felt confident enough to display Russian flags in their cars would be a good start.

...To be followed by printing their portraits on t-shirts and placing them in opposite locations, and to make matters more challenging and uncomfortable, I thought that the other side of the t-shirt should feature the flags of the countries. What I mean by opposite locations is different cities within Latvia with different Latvian/Russian percentages, so for example Daugavpils is a mainly Latvian-Russian city near the border of Lithuania, thereby I'd place the Latvian t-shirt in the town centre there, and do the opposite in Smiltene, which is a mainly Latvian city.

It sounds very confusing indeed, but I feel like it almost perfectly captures the strange, bitter and diving atmosphere in Latvia at the moment as the October Parliament election is coming up, and I'd be very interested to see the reactions concerning these issues when provoked.

[in memory of my grandmother, 17.09.2018]

the line.

I'm very interested in the limits of what is and what isn't acceptable.

Am I a bad person for my opinions? If I can argue my case, does it make it acceptable?

I had some friends over and was getting to know a girl who shares my hometown. We were both asked about our opinion on Latvian-Russians, and both of our answers fell in the lines of 'We're not bad people but we loathe them'. Another friend butted in and said, 'That's what they all say'. 

And so surely that makes us horrible people. How stereotypical of us to loathe 'foreigners'. Isn't that how Brexit happened, anyway? It's all brought on by that feeling of 'strangers in our homes'.

So where would you draw the line?

 - Someone rolls their eyes as cars and people flood their small village. 'Tourists,' they say. 'Hate them.' 

 - An older lady gives a student an evil look. She mutters incoherently under her breath. 

 - 'I hate them,' she says. 'They're everywhere and it doesn't feel like home anymore.' 

 - Another headline flashes. 'Standoff in Italian port as Salvini refuses to let refugees disembark.' 

It's hard to figure out the right things to say. How come the world's become such an uncompassionate place?

Of course these are all very different situations but they still bring in the same kinds of human characteristics.

But if I gave you my case for the third one, perhaps you'd find it easier to forgive the statement?

If I told you that more than half of the people living in my hometown are Russians with Latvian citizenship who refuse to speak Latvian, or that it's almost impossible for young people to find work unless they speak fluent Russian, or that the current leading party in our Parliament is mainly Russian -

- and knowing that we only gained our freedom in the 90s, and that thousands of Latvians were wrongly imprisoned and slaughtered, and that the rest of the world still finds it amusing to compare us to Russia or only acknowledge us as 'one of those Soviet Union countries'?

Would that make that statement acceptable?

Then again most countries have had difficult pasts so how come we're allowed to complain?

The more I think about this, the more confused I am. I feel that perhaps we are bad people after all.

pale summer

This summer was unique.

That's quite a cliché thing to say but I feel like it's the most honest thing I've ever told anybody. At nineteen and eight months I finally felt the wheels of adulthood start turning within me. It was with desperation that I attempted to cling onto the last few weeks of what I recognised as freedom, and that's what my summer project captured.

It wasn't much - just a few scribbles, some lines and doodles, a photograph or two. I saved the few bits that overwhelmed me with the feeling of inspiration but let it rest in my sketchbook whilst I put everything else on pause for the carefree enjoyment of my last weeks of being a teenager.

I am both head over heels in love and utterly petrified of growing up.

xii: the twelve photos that embody my memories

I am not a fan of presets, and yet I was amazed by this app on my phone. None of these photos have been edited by me manually - they are simply enhanced by the app. Furthermore, they are not individual photos at all.. They are stills from short videos I filmed through this app to capture what I believed were the best moments of my summer. I'm aware that these days digital quality seems to be what everybody's looking for, yet I can't help but be obsessed with grain and how it makes a photo more textured. 

These are the stills from my attempts of escape. Ever since June I have been in an anxious cycle of carefree thoughts that would eventually drag me back to the good old stressful panic every evening, be it jobs, money, adulthood or just creativity and where I can go from here. Perhaps rather stupidly I spent this summer trying to take my mind off these problems by distracting myself and going on different adventures - in a car around Latvia, a few train journeys, a flight to France.

The twelve photos I took for the summer project captured my wanders. An abandoned brewery in Cēsis, finally going back home, a day spent with the people who made me - me, petrichor in the air, a sweet tooth, a flower shop, inconveniently placed beauty, a gallery filled with inspiration, the happiness of a family, a drive into the storm, moving to our new home, my home.