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Sabīne Šnē

Sabīne Šnē (1996, Riga) lives and works in Riga. In her creative practice, she constructs visual stories to explore the intersections between culture and nature, informed by historical and current ideas. She is interested in the relationships and the interconnectedness between humans and nature. In her art, Šnē reflects on human habits, desires, traces of actions and their impact on the environment. The content of the work determines the result, but she usually works in digital media. Sabīne Šnē graduated with a BFA (2020) and an MFA (2022) from the Department of Visual Communication of the Art Academy of Latvia. She has participated in various group exhibitions and art projects in Latvia and abroad.

LIFT UP YOUR YELLOW CROWN
Mixed media installation, 2022

What does it mean to be the earth when people live on it?
This work was inspired by the ecologically-oriented social organizations that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1980s to fight for a healthy environment. Their actions provided an opportunity for people to come together to protest further pollution. People fought for nature's right to exist, to be preserved, and to regenerate, while at the same time fighting for their own rights.
Various environmental movements became active in the 1970s. A few decades earlier, the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written a science fiction story called When the World Screamed (1928). It tells the story of a professor who is convinced that the Earth is a living being. He wants to warn it of the presence of humans by piercing its mantle and awakening it. At the end of the story, the Earth wakes up and screams.
Lift Up Your Yellow Crown consists of videos and objects depicting different parts of the Earth and the human presence there. This earth is not a goddess or an Earth Mother, but rather a cyborg, where identity, gender, and the boundaries of the living and the non-living merge together.