The Hearing Voices Café was a sequence of mediated talks and performances for the Ukrainian community in Latvia. It was a space for discussion and debate, a place of respect and safety, open to all, that offered a platform to unheard voices and stories - helping these voices come together, thus forming a collective demand to be heard. Each of the events started with a theme, introduced by the evening's curators Ilze Dzenovska and Marija Zenkova, and the invited artists, who used their personal stories and art practices to engage with the many stories and voices of the community of the participants.
The project included five evening discussions, during which singer Helēna Kozlova, actor Gerds Lapoška, musical duo Ansis Bētiņš and Artūrs Čukurs, ceramicist Viktorija Broka, traditional singer Janta Meža and bandurist Darja Leleko supported the participants with their stories, voices and artistic practices. The café itself was open every evening, inviting everyone to find out more about the event, as well as to engage in informal conversations and performative experiments.
Our inner voices have different intensities and relationships with the outer world. Too often are they suppressed and criticized by systematically being excluded from the social picture of the world communities whose stories we are not used to hearing, and by silencing issues that are difficult to talk about. Let's start talking about intuition and solitude, the power of creation and renewal, guilt processes and freedom. Through researching personal experiences of war, survival, and displaced life away from one's home, we hope to foster mutual support, strengthen identity and unity of the community, which is not just passively included in the Latvian social environment taking the role of a victim, but rather as an active and insuppressible part of society.
The Hearing Voices Cafe was a project of the Goethe-Institut incorporated into a comprehensive package of measures for which the Federal Foreign Office provided funding from the 2022 Supplementary Budget to mitigate the effects of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.