Solvita Krese to Inga Lāce
Letter from Pārdaugava Torņakalns, 25.03.2019
Dear Inga!
I imagine that, like many residents of Riga, you still find Pārdaugava to be like the other side of the world. Not only is it difficult to reach, it’s not even clear why one would go there. It’s a kind of outland on the mental map of Riga. But I have lived in Torņakalns for almost 20 years, and surprisingly I feel I belong so much to this place that my memories of the previous places where I’ve lived, on the other side of the river, have faded just like old postcards of Riga. You know that I usually cycle to work— the office of the art centre— in 23 minutes. I don’t think you manage to do it much faster from Grīziņkalns. Often, while cycling home, I have keenly felt the peculiar feeling that the atmosphere in Pārdaugava differs from that on the right bank of the river. I don’t mean atmosphere in a meteorological sense here, though that also may differ, but atmosphere as rhythm, as a way you move through space. And, believe it or not, in that moment, as I cycle across the bridge, I feel myself quite physically traversing different space-times. The Pārdaugava atmosphere is calmer, more inclusive, and also more creative. Those who live here refer to visiting the right bank as “going to the city”. You head into the struggle to prove something, to manage things, to buy and sell, to meet people, to consume, relish, show off, go wild, etc., whereas on this side there’s more space for reflection and realization, for understanding things, for weaving them together— putting things in order and creating something new. It seems I’m not the only person to think this way. Well-to-do residents of Riga began to move to Pārdaugava to build their homes and manors in the nineteenth century. Alongside the villages of harbour workers and ferrymen and the merchants’ quarters, a new city segment began to take shape and soon acquired a dense cultural layer. The old streets and houses of Pārdaugava still hold memories of the presence of Krišjānis Barons, Rainis, Aspazija, Vilis Plūdonis, Jānis Akuraters, Fricis Brīvzemnieks, Garlībs Merķelis, Konrāds Ubāns, Aleksandrs Čaks, Emīls Dārziņš, Ludolfs Liberts and the other cultural greats who once lived here. Not far from my home is the former inn Jeruzaleme, which was built in the late eighteenth century and in its time was a popular entertainment venue for the residents of Riga. Today it houses the Ojārs Vācietis Memorial Museum. It is a building where the poet spent many years of his life. Poetry “came” to him in motion as he walked in Āgenskalns, on the small streets of Torņakalns, through the jungle of bird cherry trees and nettles by the Mārupīte, around Māra Pond, on the paths of Zaķusala and Lucavsala and along the bank of the Daugava from Bolderāja to Katlakalns. Turns out, Ojārs Vācietis was an avid letter writer. His letters sparkled with humour and jokes, they were brimming with self-invented words and references to a private mythology known only to a few, as well as undisguised criticism of the Soviet system. In correspondence with the poet Imants Ziedonis, who lived on the other bank of the Daugava, they used and “abused” Soviet bureaucratic documents and forms as letter paper, making brilliant parodies of the bureaucratic jargon. In addressing a letter to his penfriend, Imants Ziedonis had a habit of writing only “To Ojārs Vācietis in Altonovas Iela” on the corner of the envelope, without bothering to include the house number or postcode. Needless to add, the postman always found the addressee of the letters. The former Altonovas, now Ojāra Vācieša iela, continues all the way to the picturesque— and, to my mind, the most beautiful park in Riga— Arkādija. Across the street lies a place with a complicated historical imprint: Victory Park, which acquired its name in the 1920s, when it hosted military parades and the IX Nationwide Latvian Song Festival. In 1961, this place was renamed Park of the CPSU XXII Congress to honour the building of communism announced during this congress by Nikita Khrushchev. A pond was excavated, the bed of the Mārupīte was altered and a lawn was planted. In the 80s, the monument glorifying Soviet power became the dominant element in the park, which regained its former name. The shadow of the Soviet period never left this place. Each year on 9 May, when a significant part of the Russian-speaking community gather there to celebrate the victory of the Soviet nation in the Great Patriotic War, I try to avoid this place. That is when I see another Riga there— the remaining handful of war veterans with medals dangling on their chests proudly mingle among the many-headed crowd, which towards the evening reaches an ecstatic and rather aggressive frenzy, glorifying the neighbouring empire and revealing the traumatic past of the two-community society, the consequences of the awkward integration policy and the potential of the manipulative power of the media. I prefer to see Pārdaugava as similar to La Rive Gauche in Paris— the left bank of the Seine, a district where intellectuals, artists and students gather, where brave and extraordinary ideas are born. Torņakalns and Āgenskalns are similarly popular among artists, writers and other cultural workers, and many cultural institutions have found their place here, on this side of the Daugava. Among them are a number of charming and interesting museums, including those dedicated to Jānis Akuraters, Ojārs Vācietis, Eduards Smiļģis, and Žanis Lipke. The sculpture garden of Indulis Ranka is located right here, behind the bend of the Mārupīte, and the culture project Noass is anchored near AB Dambis. Kalnciema Quarter has become a notable cultural platform, while across the street the residence of the initiative Mākslai vajag telpu comes to life in summer. Dirty Deal Teatro, one of the most interesting independent theatres, has also moved to Āgensgalns, a visit to which can be followed by a stop at the bar of the Hāgenskalns Commune, where one can continue to enjoy culture, and soon Āgenskalns Market will reappear as a new culture venue. Here you have it all; there’s so much to see and experience! Not to mention the library, which is connected to the new premises of the University of Latvia by an ant trail-like flow of students. And isn’t it great that Survival Kit has this year ended up on the other side of the Daugava in the former building of the University’s Faculty of Physics and Mathematics? This former German orphanage, built in the nineteenth century, which graces the border of Āgenskalns/ Torņakalns, was an unexpected discovery for me. Well-hidden behind a mound and some old trees, it had remained unnoticed during my countless wanderings in this neighbourhood. It almost feels like getting behind the curtain of the city, in a sort of outland. Now, isn’t it an ideal place for speaking and thinking about the outsiders of the local and global community? Do you remember how I told you about the Siamese prince Aditya, who in November 1930 visited said orphanage while passing through Riga on his way from Warsaw to Reval? Urban legend has it that the first snow took the prince here by surprise and that he had “frolicked affectionately” and snow- balled with the “little folk”. I can only try to imagine the point in space-time at which he might have ended up here, and what the world map and its socio-political processes would have looked like at the time. To do so would be to try to grasp the nature of what this little-known place in Pārdaugava might add to the works of the artists in Survival Kit, to try to understand an entirely unexpected system of coordinates. Yet any doubt about the ambiguous contours of this outland is dispelled by Ojārs Vācietis, who proposes a new perspective: If the point of the compasses is put in the middle of the Mārupīte and a circle is drawn— this is the centre of Riga.*
Best wishes,
Solvita
Inga Lāce to Solvita Krese
Letter from Grīziņkalns
Hi, Solvita!
Isn’t it interesting that, in organising this year’s festival, we will for the first time be in reversed roles! Heading to work at the venue of the festival, the former Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, I will be the one who has to cross the Daugava each day. I know, the river is more of a psychological barrier, and, after all, Grīziņkalns is rather well-connected to Pārdaugava, whether one travels by public transport, car or bike, but I am yet to figure out the quickest and most convenient route. By the way, I moved to Grīziņkalns by accident. After two years spent in Amsterdam, with a new education but also a broken heart, I spent a few soothing weeks on the beach at Jūrmala before later moving with slightly sunburnt skin and two suitcases into twenty-eight square metres, freshly redecorated. While settling into the new apartment, I for the first time purchased things that were larger than a hairdryer or an iron. Yet, even once I owned a sofa, a fridge and a washing machine, this temporary, “I will soon leave again” feeling remained. At first, my negligence towards my closest surroundings manifested itself in tiny details. For almost a year and a half I had not even looked at the map on my phone to find the nearest stop and thus had travelled an inconvenient route to Brīvības iela instead of simply going around the corner to a stop from which buses 3 and 6 could take me almost all the way to work. I seemingly lived here, yet in my thoughts I was in Amsterdam, Paris or New York, depending on the occasion. All my experiences also usually took place elsewhere. On one of those dull evenings, while sitting on my new sofa, I got a message from my Chilean friend from Amsterdam. Detecting my sour mood, even through a Facebook window, and in an attempt to cheer me up, he said that every life contains several lives and sent me the writer Svetlana Boym’s essay “Nostalgia”. Tracing the history of nostalgia from the seventeenth century, she explains that at first it was perceived of as an illness that, similar to other ailments of the time, could be cured by opium, leeches or a trip to the Swiss Alps. Yet in today’s globalised world, Boym concludes, the condition of one who is nostalgic is “to be homesick and to be sick of being at home— occasionally at the same time”. My condition certainly was not clinical, yet my being sick of home, or rather my longing for Amsterdam, or an entirely in- determinable longing to be anywhere but the place where I was, was put into sharp relief by another situation. Having lived in Los Angeles for two months, while the other curator of festival Survival Kit, Àngels Miralda, was staying in my apartment, I arrived home to find several new items— a cutting board and two sharp knives. Only then did I realise that it was possible to live for three years without things that someone else would need within two months. Around a year later, I went up the staircase to the floor above mine and only then noticed that there were still a number of flats there that shared a toilet. The social standing of the neighbourhood, of course, has always, as far as I can remember, been notoriously questionable. Avotu iela, which begins without taste but still beautifully, with wedding salons, transforms into a street of prostitution near Lienes iela, where alco- holics, who, like messengers of spring, are up early on the first warm days of the year, awaiting the opening of the tiny shops, even before eight in the morning. Interestingly, this scene, which is now kept somewhat in check by regular police raids, has come into being over time as new layers of life have accumulated over what has long been one of the proletarian districts of Riga. Unlike many considerably older neighbourhoods in Riga, the construction of Grīziņkalns began only in the late nine-teenth century, prior to which the area was a virtually “empty” place, with no prior construction having taken place. It was to be a place where the workers of the surrounding factories would live. One of the enterprises in this neighbourhood, for example, was the V.Ķuze Confectionery Factory, present- day Laima, the origins of which can be traced to 1910. A little later, in 1921, the Riga Prosthesis and Orthopaedic Factory was founded here, producing a broad range of devices, starting from orthopaedic insoles, for which we used to come here with mum in my childhood, to prostheses, wheelchairs for patients and electric hearing aids. Quite fittingly for the neighbourhood, during the Revolution of 1905, Grīziņkalns Park was a venue for illegal workers’ meetings and demonstrations, one of which gathered as many as a hundred thousand people. In commemoration of the workers’ activities, the park was later renamed the Park of 1905, yet mostly it is still called Grīziņkalns. Along with its layer of socialist history, currently the park is also one of the places where I go to walk, read and sunbathe when I am too lazy or too busy to go to Jūrmala. Here I am always accompanied by neighbours undressed down to their underwear and a man who does not shy away from taking peculiar poses in order to tan the insides of his arms and legs. Today, Grīziņkalns is somewhere between being close to the centre and being somewhat on the outside. It is this condition, together with its comparatively low rent, that has ensured that more and more friends and acquaintances— people employed in the field of culture, young families and others— have begun to move here. Sometimes, while walking on Avotu iela, I wonder how much each of my neighbours pay in rent and how many months of arrears they already have and when they— the original residents— will eventually have to move out, as this neighbour- hood is slowly being taken over by hipsters such as myself. Along with the breeze of new inhabitants, the creative part of the city, little by little, is shifting towards Grīziņkalns— in the form of artist-run galleries and alternative bars. Thus, Bolderāja is fifteen minutes from my home. It is a unique bookstore and bar where the books, which you instantly want to read, are stuffed into self-made shelves, where there are worn sofas of different styles and ages and things that would seem tasteless anywhere else, such as a TV set that constantly shows the underwater world. Everything here is slightly... wow! My guests— foreign curators and philosophers— often find books they have themselves written being sold here. And sometimes, on my way home, I hurry past Bolderāja, to avoid the urge to go inside for a drink, to have a chat with Didzis or sink into the couch and discuss our Chinese horoscope signs with a new friend. People who still don’t know about Bolderāja usually misunderstand me and think I am talking about a neighbourhood in Pārdaugava— another place in Riga with a bad reputation but with access to an actual beach. With each day, I also see groups of foreign students in Grīziņkalns more frequently— both from European countries and, most often, from India and Pakistan. Their presence in this neighbourhood reminds me of all the places I miss so much and also of the fact that we are, luckily, part of the migration network that binds together student routes and light- hearted flirtation, passions, marriages and new businesses.
Keep in touch,
Inga
Àngels Miralda
Questa Ritrovata Città Di Riga (1)
This text aims to channel the spirit of an abstract imagination of place. In romanticising a place— any supposed Outland that remains unreachable— we express generalisations born of our unfamiliarity with those places that are not our own. Thus, in some cases, geographic imaginaries may produce stereotypes and uninformed judgements about others’ lives and environments. But in other cases, they may be ways to imagine utopic worlds to compare with our own surroundings in the hope of building a future. For four years, I studied art history in Italy with a focus on the artistic movement of the late 60s and 70s known as Arte Povera. Like Jannis Kounellis, a Greek artist living in Rome, I encountered La Città di Riga in a city where I was a foreigner, an eternal city which captures the imagination of countless visitors. But Kounellis set his imagination on another city— the city of “riga” which in Italian means “line”. A line can refer to the line of a drawing, or a line of text— the translation of the title “The City of Line” provides a hint that the magazine is not so much about Riga as it is about the linearity of history and the creation of new forms. This journal was based on the wanderings of the imagination that Kounellis’ generation of artists were subject to and was framed by the geopolitical boundaries and intense conditions that defined their time and place. The poveristi worked in the politically polarised and tense atmosphere of the period in Italian history known as the anni di piombo. The “years of lead” stretched from the late 60s until the beginning of the 80s and were marked by violent acts of political terrorism. After 1968, far-left and far-right factions battled each other and the government in bids for political authority. Italian society during this period was hyper-polarised in a way that seems reminiscent of our current moment, and Italian artists at the time idealised the lost utopias of modernism that had ended bitterly for Italy after the war and in the transition to postmodernism. It was in this atmosphere that Fabio Mauri staged his 1971 performance Che cosa è il fascismo (“What is Fascism?”). In 1976, Jannis Kounellis and Fabio Mauri along with Alberto Boatto, Maurizio Calvesi and Umberto Silva edited the first volume of the artists’ publication La Città di Riga.2 The name “Riga” served not as a direct reference to the Latvian capital but rather to a romantic ideal of Eastern Europe, a region which remained largely unknown to the artists, that emerged in part from ancient myths of an enchanted united Europe and the tabula rasa of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. For a group of artists concerned with conceptions of space, geography was an abstract reference— more of a symbol of lost unity than of any particular city or population. Kounellis’ own biography might explain why the East was an important reference. Himself an immigrant to Italy from his native Greece, he evinced a different identity than his peers. Whereas Pino Pascali referenced American Pop Art and the tendencies of Warhol, Kounellis was avidly anti-Warholian and rejected the mechanic qualities of American culture in favour of Russian mysticism, something that can be seen in his constant references to Malevich. The Black Square was an obsession for Kounellis, such that the art historical attribution of post-modernism to Duchamp was upturned: in his own art history, modernism began with Malevich’s destruction of painting. The centre of the art world was thus not Paris but Moscow. Working abroad in Germany, Po- land, and Yugoslavia, Kounellis referred to a mystic concept of Mitteleuropa, an idea that could not be realised in the partitioned environment of the Cold War. As the curator Dieter Roelstraete describes: “Mitteleuropa is not so much a geo-historical reality but rather an atmosphere, a certain philosophy or attitude towards life, dramatically exemplified by the illusory, melancholy world-view of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”3 During his initial journey, Kounellis was overtaken by a “passion for everything northern”,4 which Roelstraete describes as an experience of riding the Ukrainian wind across the eastern planes. La Città di Riga was aimed at creating fierce debate and opened with a text by Mario Merz that described the condition of artists as inhabitants of a long Sunday— they were workers in a profession without work and “nearly all were Marxists.”5 And yet the east of Europe was little more than an imagined space and a reference. Arte Povera had borrowed its name from Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theatre”6 and owed much of its spiritual roots to his theories. Kounellis’ fictional text “Cavolo! Che Bella Donna!”7 describes a left-wing politician who travels to Odessa. The treatise describes a wide-ranging journey that yields anecdotes of artists’ revolutionary attitudes and ends in a rejection of Lawrence Weiner’s conceptual practice— which, importantly, indicates that the play on words in the title of the magazine signified a rejection of American conceptualism. The fierce debate in La Città di Riga is finally expressed in a rambling attack by fellow artist Pier Paolo Calzolari, addressed directly to Kounellis, on the concept of the magazine not acting as a radical or revolutionary proposition but rather with a conservative and traditionalist impulse: “A magazine of the kind that you speak of is one that follows the grand traditions of European Unity; it is a magazine that is born with a clear ethical goal, clarifying, a call to action, or a work to prevent structural realignment.”8 Calzolari’s critique defines Riga as a fantasy of a lost empire— “questa ritrovata città di Riga”— in accordance with Roelstraete’s description of Kounellis’ image of Eastern Europe as a place onto which the artist could project his dreams of perished worlds. Calzolari’s onslaught continues against the absurd notion of art having influence in the political sphere.9 The critique strikes at the heart of the Western nostalgia for unknown lands and the hypocrisy of art’s political gestures against the nihilistic backdrop of its incapability to produce political change or imagine true alternatives. Kounellis published the tirade as requested. This historical anecdote, far from being simply a tangent, serves to make clear the parallels between its time and ours. Geographic borders have shifted, but the world is still divided into exclusionary economic zones that permit limited access, travel and residence. The concept of Outlands is a continuation of the proposition for a common language towards unity and the spatial project of abstraction. It also serves a specific goal of addressing the sudden shift to the right in our contemporary politics that is largely condemned by the artistic community. Rather than the exoticization of “the other” or the mystification of distant places, maybe the alternatives we seek lie in connections between individuals and the creation of common objectives. Bringing together artists from different geopolitical positions is a way of strengthening our understanding of contemporaneity against the mono-narrative of the state. If anything, the lack of Eastern European artists in Kounellis’ journal might point to the real impact that art can have in our society, the nuances that Outlands aims to address: a personal mixture and movement of people with various perspectives that can freely express and build a new consensus outside of state mechanisms of power. Artists’ stories thus serve as a cure for hyper-polarisation and isolation, and provide hope for a common future.
1 “This Rediscovered City of Riga”.
2 La Città di Riga, Pollenza, no. 1, (1976).
3 Dieter Roelstraete, “Rhapsody of the Real: Mapping the Art of Jannis Kounel-lis,” in Kounellis, ed. Emanuela Belloni (Milan: Charta, 2002), p.29.
4 “Great exhibition projects in Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Helsinki and Prague roused his passion for everything “northern.” To be more precise— as there is always an eastern wind blowing from the Ukrainian plane— this passion concerns a mythical, geographically undefined Mitteleuropa, a more or less ahistorical tabula rasa onto which the artist projects his dreams of perished worlds of unimaginable unity in days long past.” Ibid.
5 “Prima era il caos poi il lavoro, poi il caos del lavoro, poi la svestizione del caos del lavoro! Noi siamo marxisti quasi tutti per il giro di mente che dice: Marx ha visto questo elementare processo: la svestizione del caos del lavoro.” La Città di Riga, p.9.
6 Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Pe- ter Brook. Towards a Poor Theatre, 1975.
7 Mario Codognato and Mirta d’Argenzio Ed. Echoes in the Darkness: Jannis Kounellis (London: Trolley, 2002), pp.18–28.
8 “Una rivista del tipo di cui tu mi parli è una rivista che si riallaccia a grandi tradizioni di connettura europea; è una rivista che nasce chiaramente con una funzione etica, chiarificatrice, un richiamo all’attenzione, se vogliamo un’opera di prevenzione di ristrutturazi- one.” La Città di Riga, p.187. Translation my own.
9 “descrittivo: La città di Riga è caduta / Mentre masturbavo Lucia / E il poliziotto sguardo / Corrotto mangiava curioso / Un biscotto.” La Cittá di Riga, p.185. This short poem speaks to the perverse bourgeois nature of the art world as politics comes undone and the corruption of the working class policeman who eats biscuits as the city falls.