French spring 2007, exhibition "Urbanologic"

Changes in exhibition opening hours:

Friday, June 15  - closed
Friday, June 22 - 13:00 - 18:00
Saturday, June 23 - closed
Sunday, June 24 - closed

Exhibition prolonged till July 8

Thursday July 5, 6, 7 - 13:00 - 19:00
Sunday July 8 - 13:00 - 18:00

The majority of people now live in towns. The conditions created by the urban environment shape the dense cloth of everyday rituals and are involved in forming the meanings of private and public space. A city is formed not only by buildings and transport highways but rather by containers of meanings, information flows, language grids and vectors of different tensions. Cities are like living organisms that tend to be both dynamically and aggressively expanding as well as impotent, confused and shrinking. They can be the “generic cities” of Rem Koolhaas governed by the dynamics of explosive development based on capitalist pragmatism or global cities as defined by Saskia Sassen where the local is in constant interaction with the global. A city’s development trajectory may be influenced analysis of the urban situation governed by economic interests and gentrification or the manoeuvres of the public in the attempt to protect or the efforts of rapid commercialisation to reconquer a segment of the public space. We could permit the assumption that a city grows by itself. Whatever the case, it cannot be denied that the city has great influence on the behaviour, habits and thinking of its residents.

Rapid changes can be currently observed in the urban landscape, which are encouraging the formation of a new urban typology. The language of the city is determined by the urban rituals, navigation signs and gestures that have been activated and integrated in a complex social weave. By activating the transformation of the private and public space, serving as catalysts for the conflict of different positions and nursing the spirit of resistance, cities create a platform for pluralism and diversity offering a common living space for individuals with roots in different cultures and identities. Currently, the discourse on national identity that is topical in many countries is also becoming one of the items on the city agenda. Or is there a fear of becoming lost in the jungles of globalisation, the flow of migration and the mapping of nomadic trends.

As in a sophisticated cookery book recipe, the language of the city consists of numerous ingredients whose proportions go on to determine each city’s special flavour. Wine drinking traditions, the impressions of Proust’s lost time, 1968 and the experiments of the Situationists create the preconditions for the articulation of a different city language. Similarly, the “mental” cartography of Riga has been formed by the urban archaeology of Soviet times, the garden allotments in the city centre, by the annual walks to Bolderāja of the Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings or the fish pavilion of Riga Central Market.

Artists

Latvian and French artists invited to participate in the exhibition have been those who in their works try to discover urban conditions, to research the city's signs and rituals that have their roots in urban logic. The artists try to find out the places and situations where the urban environment dominates, which at times gives individuals a feeling of alienation and being out of place, and they try to record the behaviour models of the townspeople. They document the city's non-places such as filling stations, viaducts and ring roads (Joffrey Ferry), the city's in-between states - places without a function, building sites and the city's transformation processes (Stefan Couturier). They record impersonal apartment block districts that can be seen in all expanding cities. The balcony trellises whose ornamental motifs, like graffiti, shape the city's unique topography of signs, reinforce and illustrate the apartment block residents' feelings of insecurity and isolation (Ēriks Božis). Voldemārs Johansons attempts to perceive and register a kind of non-place or the city's "invisible" with the help of a recording device attached to a meteorological probe and turning the material obtained into a soundscape.

Graffiti works like underlined notes supplementing the "official" visual communication encountered in city streets. It is positioned as a manifestation of subcultures as well as being seen as environmental pollution. Maija Kurševa traces the evolution of street art with the help of an emblematic personage. In turn, Nicolas Moulin's work shows an empty city where all the signs that confirm the presence of people have been erased. By creating a map of Paris from the vectors of the movement of one-way streets, Pierre Malphette turns the city itself into a graphic sign. Krišs Salmanis materialises the unstable grid of urban logic in a house of cards allowing us to see the contours of a triumphal arch, which, like a symbol of might, tends to decorate cities' central squares and serve as a sign of recognition.

The project by Kate Krolle and Katrīna Šauškina captures the expansion of the urban environment into the rural territory of the suburbs. Cycling around the Riga administrative boundary, the artists document the stories of those living on the border and the rapid changes in the rural environment. People's resistance to the industrialisation of the urban environment and their desire for their own corner of land is expressed in the garden allotments, which have been "planted" not just in the suburbs but which also try to compete with the industrial environment in territories not far from the Riga city centre. Artist Līga Laurenoviča explores the architecture of allotments where the presence of urban details confirms the close ties to the city mentality. "Flower people" have found an easier compromise between living in the city and the need for nature. They have been photographed by Māra Brašmane in their apartments and workplaces surrounded by houseplants. Pierre Malphette's installation also tells of the interaction between nature and the urban environment. Eucalyptus branches enclosed in the space are moved by the flow of air from a ventilator reminding us of the rustle of leaves in the wind.

In Latifa Echakhch's work, the city is seen as a stage for the confrontation of various cultures and socio-political platforms. The viewer is a witness to an episode when, after a demonstration in Paris in 2005, caretakers with green brushes clean the street behind the crowd that is going off into the distance. In its way this symbolises a position of power that a large part of the Western world identifies with. Also historical references of a kind that interchange with the notes of a private story can be seen in Katrīna Neiburga's work. The artist explores a small apartment in a residential building in the city centre. This is the home of a typical townsperson but has, for some unknown reason, been deserted by the owner leaving behind various kinds of evidence of the resident's life. Reminiscences of the Soviet times mingle with notions of the way of life in the "new times" cast doubt on the uniqueness of the private story of the individual and evoke associations with the fate of the "little person" at the turn of ages.

The project is organized by

Theproject is financially supported by

Informative sponsors