I Don't Know Where I Am
2019
Projections of drawings by pupils from the Riga Secondary School of Cultures, various items
Izolde Cēsniece (1970) is an artist and pedagogue. She graduated from the Department of Stage Design at the Art Academy of Latvia and is currently continuing her education at the University of Latvia’s Faculty of Humanities, where she studies social anthropology. She has worked on stage design for several theatre performances and participated in the Latvian National Women’s League, which raised feminist issues in art. Her project for Survival Kit 10.1 will be the fourth on which she has worked together with pupils. The first three focused on pupils’ reading of the Latvian epic poem Lāčplēsis in Japanese (Lāčplēsis. Read a Good Book Again, 2012), on how they saw Latvian contemporary art (DNA Portrait of Latvia's Recent Art History, 2014), and on how they imagined the citizen of the future state (Citizen of the Future State, 2018). Now, as teenagers, having reached the threshold to adulthood, the pupils map their imagined life as an uncharted territory in order to understand where they are and what is important to them.
I Don't Know Where I Am is dedicated to the mapping of an imaginary land. Maps are drawn in order to understand where you are in unfamiliar territory. Adolescents are in a very peculiar position in relation to the rest of the society. Until the age of 18, they are officially considered to be children, while on their 18th birthday they often quite unexpectedly find themselves in another world – an outland. In the absence of a smooth transition from one status to the other, for many years, adolescents find themselves in a prolonged state of passage, where various pointers and maps are present. Yet, in the end, the most valuable maps are those which they compile themselves.