Noir Rīga
Book (Ainars Kamoliņš, Sanita Grīna, Paulis Liepa, Alise Landsberga), installation (Iliana Veinberga, Vilnis Vējš), research, 2014
Waking up late, being tired, drifting through neighbourhoods not mentioned in tourist guides, accidentally encountering people and overhearing strangers’ conversations. Vizualise long extinct or hard-to-locate pubs filled with cigarette smoke which, although striving for chic, are only visited by the dregs of society. Imagine that an unintentionally encountered femme fatale may awaken passions and prompt a change in the current flow of life. Or getting stuck into an incident and become guilty without guilt. Being inside a whirl of such moods and events, the face of the city where they take place changes as well. Its shadowy side moves to the foreground. Typically, it is concealed from the superficial observer, even if he is looking for exoticism in the city, and a break from the daily routine. It is not the events themselves that are hidden to the casual observer. Anyone can easily see and experience them. It is more difficult to see these events in a particular space of imagination, where the city reveals itself in Noir illumination. Utopian city in this project is the noir city, Riga, offered up to the gaze of a chance visitor.
Artists' Bios:
Iliana Veinberga and Ainārs Kamoliņš are interested in the unimportant and forgotten trivia of philosophy, literature, art and cultural history. One of the ways to make them significant is to recontextualize these stories using other media. Balancing between meaning and joke, the aim of Veinberga and Kamoliņš is to in-form these little stories so that they might perhaps reveal a previously hidden potentiality of thought and content.