Andris Grinbergs / Laima Žurgina. The Ugly Duckling – Child of Man.
Director Laima Žurgina Documentary film, 20’48”, 1985
The film tells the story of the period after 1976 that Grinbergs spent working at the special boarding school in Mazirbe. The school was attended by young people with special educational needs who often came from disadvantaged families. Grinbergs taught drawing, taking the programme that had been developed in Moscow for the entire USSR by the pedagogue Boris Nemensky and adapting it for the needs of a special school. Developing his idea of art as therapy, Grinbergs created the cycle Apple Tree, in which young people chose a tree from the school garden that they cared for, made drawings of and conversed with in letters. The film uncovers a brief episode that shows that it was possible (albeit sometimes only briefly) for manifestations of underground culture as well as radical methods of alternative education to enter and exist in the unified Soviet cultural space.
Artist's bio
Andris Grinbergs (b. 1946, Riga, Latvia) is a representative of the hippy movement and an artist who entered the Latvian art scene in the late 1960s. Together with like-minded people, he created forms of art not supported during the Soviet period, such as performances and happenings, which were captured by photographers including Atis Ieviņš, Māra Brašmane, Jānis Kreicbergs and others. The best known of Grinbergs’ creative expressions were his performances The Wedding of Jesus Christ and Self-portrait, the latter of which was made in 1972 as part of a series of short films made by the experimental cinema collective Biroja grupa (“The Office Group”). Since the mid-1970s, he has worked as a pedagogue, teaching drawing at the Mazirbe Special Boarding School as well as at educational institutions in Riga.
Text by Inga Lāce