The city has long since ceased to be perceived in the category of architecture alone. It is shaped by containers, mutations, terra vague, communication and transport flows, the people who live there, a special form of folklore or expression that characterises its environment, its informal ghetto zones, the "city jungle" and so on. The city's urban grid most visibly accumulates the mutations created by the transformations of the globalisation process. It both accepts and attempts to spit out the global world's innovations and deformations.
The artists in this project have been invited to create their own subjective image of the city without trying to ideologise it or submitting to urban myths. After all, the very basis of the city's cloth is woven from individual people's stories, memories, meetings that didn't take place, conversations
The narrative structure can be read in everything we do. We are always only the co-authors in our own stories and participants in the stories of others. The city can fundamentally influence and change the course and format of our stories; it can allow them to be organised in a logical chain of events with a beginning and a consistent ending, or they may fall into a mosaic of fragments of improbable coincidences. It is a similar case with the stories created for this project. Their objectivity, based on documentary materials, may transform into private language forms, fictions and new mythologies thus creating each artist's individual message about Riga. As a whole, the project has been envisaged as the registration of the impulses of the city's marginal spaces because any representation of a city can only be a reduced version of its essence.
The photographs by Egons Spuris and Gvido Kajons capture the presence of a time that no longer exists. While both seeming to document impassively Riga's old working class districts and keeping to the concept of "subjective documentarism", they also register their attitude to what is happening in the grip of reality. With the help of framing and selection, the photographs of Soviet realities create the notion of the formatting of a unified ethical and aesthetic platform.
Andrejs Grants, using what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment in combination with a thought-out arsenal of technical means manages to show convincingly the poetry of his city. The works by Inta Ruka - portraits of city people - extend beyond the walls of the hall, and blending into the crowd, they find their home on the advertising stands by the city's bus and tram stops where they will be on view from 9 September till 5 October. The socio-poetic observations by Kaspars Goba of Roma/Gypsy life in the Riga suburbs create a sense of the quite autonomous existence of a living space parallel to one of the city's "official" territories. For Gints Gabrāns and Ilva Kļaviņa, the city is only material or a background for the creation of new stories. By transforming a vagrant from the Riga railway station subways into a media star, Gabrāns attempts to unmask the mechanisms of media strategies. Ilva Kļaviņa, on the other hand, combines the stereotypes of cinema language with the charm of local provincialism to revive viable characters now exterior to the artist's "brief".
The artists invited from abroad employ different segments of experience to create their stories. Brigitte Carnochan projects her childhood memories in the Riga environment and, by making an original identification manoeuvre, she forms a series of images of Riga girls. Ingeborg Lockemann is engaged in a cautious observation of the city. She uses the characteristic features of the elements of the local environment iconography to create a personal topography of the city, a new map of Riga. Swedish artist Ebba Matz brings a personal system of images closer to the generally recognised language of signs in a story about herself in the city of Riga. British artist Marcus Haydock's story about the city is made up of people he has met and got to know in Riga.
Project organiser - Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. Curator Solvita Krese.
The organisers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Soros Foundation-Latvia, the Culture Capital Foundation, the British Council, the Nordic Information Centre, the Embassy of Sweden in Latvia, the Riga Restauration Bureau and other sponsors, with a special thank you to Filips Kļaviņš.
