Rerooted Snapshot
2019
Series of photographs and photo archives
Variable dimensions
In her works, Inga Erdmane (1973) draws attention to the relationships between society and the individual, documenting actual events and offering interpretations of them with installations, video, photographs and photobooks. The artist’s interest in systems and structures is often focused on borders, where individuals enter so-called "grey zones". Erdmane graduated from the Department of Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, having also studied psychology in Riga. She has self-published six books and has taken part in book fairs and exhibitions in Latvia, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Guatemala and elsewhere.
Rerooted Snapshot is a reconstruction of pre-existing images and the situations depicted therein. The main protagonists of the project are representatives of various nationalities who have recently moved to Latvia and are currently trying to adapt and integrate into the new environment. Among them are people from Europe, Fiji, Peru, Russia, Syria, United State of America and others. Snapshots and family albums shape personal history and constitute important archives in the cultures of different nations, since they mostly show typical family lives instead of stereotypical depictions of foreign cultures. By borrowing snapshots from the personal archives of these families and attempting to reconstruct the situations they portray in a different environment and with different people, Erdmane blurs the lines between the original material and that which is created artificially, thus also symbolically erasing the division between the foreign and the local.
erdmane.com