Exhibition of Submissions to Andrejsala Design Competition
An exhibition of designs of outdoor objects, connected to the 'Andrejsala 2007' international competition, was running in the Main hall of the Andrejsala Hull Shop from the 4th to 18th of July.
Within the first round of the Andrejsala 2007 international design competition, there were altogether 26 submissions for projects of outdoor benches and litterbins and 9 for systems of signage and guideposts. Of these, the three best projects of benches and litterbins were promoted to the second round of the contest. A more extensive article about the competition is here.
Acoustic Dessert's Cherry-picked Menu
A concert on July 4 at Dirty Deal Café (Andrejsala's Welding Shops) rang in the first Acoustic Dessert event, dedicated to showcasing some of the top Latvia-based unplugged acts: Goran Gora, Martin Confused, Markö Lakehill, Tu tupi runā, as well as Modris and Mārtiņš of the now-defunct Catapulta. This was a suitably sweet diet, especially after the loud and vast live concerts in Rīga a few days earlier.
It is intended to develop Acoustic Dessert into an even bigger event that would bring out not just the known and trendy but also new talent, paired perhaps with future invitees from abroad.
DataBlender Records’ Presentation
July 6 saw a presentation of the DataBlender record label at Andrejsala’s Dirty Deal Cafe (Welding Shops). Audio performances featured Cariyuga (techno, London/Tokyo), Ntrg8 (live, Leeds), Noizbar (breakcore, London), Ske (electrostep, Edinburgh), Redele (Brazilelectro, Ogre), Aplanet (techno, Ogre), and Raxs (techno, Rīga), while veejaying was in the capable hands of Linards Kulless (Rīga), Kavi (Ogre), Mebele (Ogre) + guests.
The DataBlender record label is covered by mixed society's relationship with unknown art forms and massive events. Currently the label is based in London, Chicago, Baltic States and Osaka, where its representatives use various recording and filming techniques to exchange the sound and video influence using direct and online networking.
'Future Shorts' July Screening
At its summer screening, the Future Shorts festival demonstrated that it's pretty serious about signing up a greater number of Baltic-made cinematographic pieces. Excited fans flocked to check out the new trend to Pulkvedis, in the Andrejsala Power Shop, on July 6.
The evening opened with Fender Bender, directed by Daniel Elliott (UK) and cast with Estonian actors and film professionals. The second on the list was the very fresh Safety Matches, directed by the 2Annas grand-prix winner Didzis Eglītis (Latvia), in which the set-up initially involves a radiantly happy outing of a Latvian family of the 1960s, but the events hit a sour note when an incident exposes the harsh duality between vanity and humanity.
Other than the above Estonian and Latvian contributions, July’s Future Shorts screening was, almost by an established tradition, cosmopolitan. Austria was represented by The Lovers, a short directed by Johannes Hammel, in which he has made a technically intricate, even abstractionist use of fragments of an old adult movie. The British filmmaker William Sinclair's Tell it to the Fishes was full of elements of everyday satire and some definite bits of sick humour. Last but not least, a video called Love Being, which was also part of the July 6 Future Shorts programme, introduced the legendary group of graphic design artists, The Designers Republic.
'Birth of a Comic' in Andrejsala
On July 7, a new free comic strip magazine called 'kuš!' was presented at the Dirty Deal Café culture hub also known as the Welding Shops of Andrejsala. The free-admission event was called the Birth of a Comic and involved several Latvian artists – Maija Kurševa, Krišjānis Rijnieks and Anete Melece among them – who created an oversized comic right in front of the audience. That's how the story about Kušmens, the fictional godfather of kuš!, came to light. In addition, two bands, Dun Dun and All Day Long (post-rock and ska & punk, respectively) as well as DJ KSPRS were playing.
Comics, which can be differentiated into comic strips and the more book-like graphic novels, are very popular in France, Finland, Germany, the United States and a number of other countries, while in Latvia most of the publications of this genre to date have been intended for children. But, with the arrival of the new kuš! mag, there are well-grounded expectations that it will entertain and widen the interests of 15-to-25-year-olds. It is a monthly publication with each issue containing a set of five to seven comic strips both by local artists and by foreign contributors.
Literary Evening at The Theatre of Dreaming
Based in the Power Shop of Andrejsala, The Theatre of Dreaming staged a literary get-together on July 7. It began with a sequence of the Theatre's own miniature poetic numbers themed to the idea of You and me. Each of the actors was accompanied and the performance made as if more visual through the use of appropriate audio tracks.
A concurrent book sale offered products in the Russian language costing just a couple dozen santims apiece.
'ShitArt' Workshop
On July 8, the Biezpiens gallery offered a workshop in the Market Square of the Andrejsala South End in which locally collected refuse – call it litter, trash, garbage, waste – was being turned into artwork. In the afternoon all the resulting chunks of art went back to litterbins. The creative process, in other words, started with making art out of dirt, and then finished off with recycling art into dirt.
'Photography Thursday'
"Just a coincidence," commented the regulars of Andrejsala, when on the 12th of July four photographic exhibitions were independently unveiled, plus, the Riga Zoom studio moved in to its new home within the territory. Solvita Krese, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, echoed the visitors' surprise when, addressing the presentations' guests, she announced that this was a first Latvian 'photo art festival' of this kind.
Let's begin with Warm Skin, a photographic exhibition by Elīna Ļihačeva and Laila Halilova, which opened at the project space Canteen of the Centre for Contemporary Art, creating an affably bohemian mood amidst the sonic context of exquisite experimental music. Halilova's was a series of black-and-whites that captured simple, unrationalised states of just feeling good. The monochromatic technique and the execution in large black exhibition frames added a touch of distinct style, a certain level of kitsch that may be found in upscale coffee shops. Black-and-whiteness draws you in with its emphasis on more condensed significance, naturally requiring from the viewer to interpret it receptively and figuratively. Abolishing of colour palettes also means that the artist refrains from documenting the reality; it dematerialises the subjects and turns them into a set of symbols, an alphabet, which, when arranged and looked at in a particular order, still result in different signifiers and signifieds for each viewer. Quoting from Halilova's manifesto for the exhibition, her series is about the fun of idling while disregarding any external circumstances and about people who enjoy idle fun. A rare and delicate slant reveals special moments and the self-sufficiency of images and protagonists, their unconcern about the presence of a camera.
Ļihačeva, in a purposeful counter-move, exhibited depersonalised scenes from garden parties, suitably shot as colour snaps made with a cheap consumer camera. The randomness of the selection of stills – even if it remains a mystery for at least some of the onlookers – does generate a sweet medley of cosiness and naïveté, a sort of childish clumsiness throughout the series. The two photographers had also joined forces to create fragments of fictional personal journals that, to the delight of the more pragmatic visitors, finally added a nuance of sensations and a story-like context glaringly missing in the photos themselves. At the exhibition, the persistent question that floated in the air was whether the pictures or the idea had come first: Warm Skin wasn't about composing individual and impressive stills but rather about the combined message of the entire show. This augmented the pleasure of looking at a wall of honour displaying portraits of a number of male acquaintances of Elīna and Laila, in which the subjects had been made more personal with the help of "questionnaire forms" that imitated the typical elements of dating ads, scientific surveys and school students' journals. Providing an opportunity for sensing others' warmth and, in a sense, taking the temperature of hot spots might have been the effective goal of the photographic duet.
A couple of buildings down the road – at Andrejsala's Power Shop, there began Photographic Journals, an exhibition of works made by younger-generation photographers who had attended the 2006 International Summer School of Photography. It employed a novel technique of exhibiting: cycling of the photos on wide-screen TV sets. A slightly dazzling and disorganising approach, this required the viewers to keep up with the pace instead of freely choosing the length of one's attention span for each picture. On the other hand, the system of "one TV per artist" helped to concentrate on each set of creations and to respect the intended sequence of events. A diary is a timed narrative and, in this case, each photo functioned as a distinct node in the web of the entire story, while the photoartists seemed to have assumed the roles of scriptwriters or directors. The ideological and technical oneness chosen by the group also encouraged comparing and contrasting the various creative horizons of the eight authors. Each revealed his or her take on their private lives, showing their world-views and the artistic decisions they had made in publicly positioning their personalities and their intimate space.
The third location – at the often-noisy partying place cum culture hub called Dirty Deal Café – featured the unveiling of a lomography workshop and exhibition. The lomographic movement dates back to the 1980s when certain enthusiasts of visual art discovered Lomo LC-A, a consumer product introduced by the industry of the then-communist bloc; the camera turned out wackily warped photos with vivid, fantastic and smudged hues, especially when shot in difficult or scarce lighting. Excitement grew very quickly all over the world: spontaneous communities of lomography arose, starting a peculiar form of art, in which the rule of thumb says that photographs should be taken impromptu, almost at random, without composing your shots and thus coming up with improvised and sometimes shocking pictures. At the first lomoshows in Moscow and New York, oversized photographic collages were created from snapshots picturing the daily events of the respective cities. The Latvian lomography event too held up the idea of enjoying the play of patterns and symbols characteristic of this genre of collating. With a motto from party to party and expressing an urban style, the collaborative lomo-piece challenged the visitors to find familiar places and people amidst the riot of colour.
At Pilsētas laboratorija, Belarusian hardcore tracks, vodka with tomato juice and pieces of richly fat bacon set the ambience for the unveiling of Unbuzzed, an exhibition of stills by Latvian Elīna Banga, depicting the scenes she'd captured when travelling to the neighbouring socialist-oriented country, unique because they are naturally transformed by street personas and surprising to the viewer because they have rapidly and unredeemably disappeared here in Latvia. Several explanations could be in place for the apparent nostalgia when revisited by these characters of the defunct soviet system (e.g., Lenin the granddad of all children): reminiscence of one's childhood, or, on the contrary, marvelling at the vast transformations affecting Latvia as it converges with the phenomena of the West European capitalism. All in all, the photographic journey 15 years back to the past was filled with déjà vus. Besides, Banga's photographs matched extremely well the authentic interiors of the former chemical lab.
Proguary's for Prog Rock
On July 14, a progressive rock concert took place at the Andrejsala Pulkvedis club (a.k.a. the Carpenter Shop). Titled Proguary, the event featured Latvian bands Holy Lamb and Toms Londons as well as The Skys from Lithuania. This was an event not to be missed by the most devoted aficionados of progressive rock, on a summer weekend when others yielded to the temptations of the traditional Latvian Fishermen's Festivities in coastal areas.
Toms Londons treated the audience to a new revelation that prog rock can be played by one of the band's guitarists not using any sound processing at all.The Skys showed that their realm is a genuinely and unremittingly pinkfloydic psychedelia. Lastly, Holy Lamb re-interpreted some of the best compositions of their three albums and threw in a recap of several songs by Genesis and Pink Floyd.
Download Holy Lamb songs The Meeting of the Majorminors, Rainfall in Your Heart and Stars Fell on Fertile Lands (mp3); The Skys songs Broken Sounds of Truth, Virtual Reality and Waiting for the Light (mp3).
Pan/Tone Gig
On July 20, the Canadian minimalist Pan/Tone, known as the creator of the 'rockno' sub-genre of dance and a favoured performer at many of the world's dance clubs, played at the Andrejsala Space:Garage. Pan/Tone, who in real life goes by the name of Sheldon Thompson, has released several solo projects since the late 1990s. Especially his Sid LeRock and Gringo Grinder became popular with musical gourmets and leading deejays around the planet.
At the Andrejsala concert he performed the material of his most recent and self-titled project Pan/Tone, highlighting and materialising the current trend of grubby minimal techno.
Camera in Fashion
21st of July, the photographic studio 'Imagine' unveiled a two-man exhibition of stills by Mikhail Tolmachev (Russia) and Oskars Pastars (Russia/Latvia). The contents of the exhibition did really support the views of the photo artists: ‘Beside automobiles, wristwatches and a vast variety of other accessories, the good life nowadays also requires the company of large cameras. Taking pictures in some cases becomes secondary and the cameras are turned into personal style items. Thus the camera complements your wardrobe because it's a fashion highlight in its own right. You may even forget about deeper artistic expressions and settle on simply enjoying this very expensive kind of toy. The bigger the camera, the better photos you can take. But cameras do not care about anything of the above: they are just tools for capturing scenes and atmospheres, tastes, lights and shades... Fashion heroes and fashion victims, all click alike’.
Performance of the Descendance Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Dance Troupe
"When the English arrived to the beautiful island of Australia, all of us were going around naked just like animals. Since we didn't want to scare them, we did up our hair and started donning these loincloths..." And that's how it looked – open-minded but at the same time self-confident, as they used to be tens of thousands of years ago – when the artists of the Descendance Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Dance Troupe began their performance of authentic choreography and song in the evening of July 22 in Andrejsala.
The initial expectations of the audience were, simply speaking, exceeded because the concert incorporated not just dance but also offered an entire tour of the aboriginal culture. It turned out that ritual dancing is inseparable from its accompaniment on various wooden percussions and from two-part singing involving an overtone technique and based in prehistoric legends and other accounts. Descendance's chants tended to be simple and yet wonderfully in tune, also decorated with spontaneous and expressive calls and howls, in which wild fauna seemed to unite with the tribes inhabiting the same wilderness.
The group is made up of professional performers belonging to the historical Australian tribes who now tour the world to spread their wondrous and ancient heritage. Spiritual strength coupled with an astounding composure characterised each and every move and glance of the performers, as they seemed to be able to actually see beyond the everyday reality and somehow observe the on-goings of an invisible magical world. The longing gazes persisted especially during the ritual chant about the fresh breeze called linge-linge, which according to a legend utters an unrelenting homing call to every tribal child who has strayed too far away from his of her family.
What makes the Aboriginal ritual chanting resemble other projects of preservation and reviving of ancient cultural heritage that are active around the world is that they often focus on simple events of daily life. A recurrent topic is the endeavours related to obtaining food: fishing, observing events typical of coastal areas, hunting and venerating the mighty forces of nature, which ensures good luck for those going fishing or hunting. The moves that are now part of the ritual dances have been created by imitating those seen among animals: the slithering of a snake, the light skipping and fluttering of hands in the likeness of butterflies and the agitated trotting and bustling about reminding of some smaller mosquitoes. In short, harmonious oneness with nature and respect for the natural forces is the modern-day philosophy of the Descendance members. At the Rīga concert, one of them said that even the body decorations with red, yellow and white paint aren't random because the three colours represent the Earth, the Sun and the Spirit, respectively, while the entire triad symbolises the chief forces and objects of veneration known in the Aboriginal culture.
Some of the spectators, already inspired and liberated by the performance, were asked to join on stage the ancient dances of hunting and fishing tribes. Aboriginals also taught Rigans to pronounce several incantations to honour the forces of nature. The performance finished with Bauba vaija, an exciting anthem that chases away evil spirits and summons the good ones.
Watch a video. (WMV, 62.6 MB)
Press Event for Unveiling the CALL Your Kid NOW Social Campaign
A press conference at the Imagine photographic studio on July 23 opened the CALL your kid NOW social campaign, in which the director of the campaign Andris Lembergs, the minister for children and family affairs Ainars Baštiks and the director of the Centre of Emergency and Disaster Medicine Mārtiņš Šics were present.
For two weeks, that is, until the 5th of August, the campaign worked towards its objective of "urging the Latvian society to pay greater attention to the attitude of adults toward their children's well-being and promoting progressive parenting, specifically by encouraging parents to realise the potential dangers of neglectful childcare".
Freakbikes are Back!
It began in May, when in a three-day workshop event organised in the South End of Andrejsala, about a dozen untraditional bike-like vehicles were created. Shortly after they were displayed and demoed during the Museum Night. In July, to strengthen the role of Andrejsala's Garages as a "freakbike centre", the builders of freakbikes staged one more public event at their base. It involved an exposition of the independently designed bicycles, which lasted from July 23 to August 3.
'God's Potential': Exhibition of Paintings by Līna Dzērvāne
In late July, An exhibition titled 'God's Potential' by painter Līna Dzērvāne was opened at the Andrejsala-based Museum of Naïve Art to remain on display until the closure of its summer season of 2007.
Līna Dzērvāne has filled her paintings with a lot of spiritual light. They exude with the same confidence-bolstering qualities as does the artist herself. Līna's focus in life is to open the God's potential in people searching for a joyfulness lost, for new goals and for interest in the surrounding world.
Fallen Girl Monument
On July 26, three artists working on Rīga's Esplanāde created a graffiti piece in the form of a Monument to a Fallen Girl to mark the finish of this year's Latvian 'STOP Sex Terrorism' social campaign. From the 27th of July to 26th of August, the object was on display beside the Repository of Andrejsala's South End.
The campaigners worked on changing the somewhat widespread image of Rīga as a place for cheaply having a fling and sex services readily available not just at specialised "businesses" but also from regular girls at nightclubs, bars and discos.
Since the beginning of the social campaign, there were observations of an increased awareness of the sex tourism problem, which attests that it had been known to public and only waiting for a more open discussion.
'Scape[e]scape' Performance
On the 27th of July, three artistic media – modern dance, the violin and electronics+video – got mixed and married at a Scape[e]scape performance, which took place at the Dirty Deal Café culture hub (Welding Shops of Andrejsala). A single motif was interpreted in a three-fold way by exchanging and returning impressions and by allowing a text piece and the feel carried by it to give birth to a concerted sonorous and visual landscape. The text was channelled through these media and acquired their particular vocabularies; the result was a synchronous performance.
The authors of the piece are an artistic ensemble called skurrilletten radioaktiv, active since 2006 and consisting of Agita Duwe, Inese Pavlova and Diegonante. The Skurrilletten project space (Berlin/Kreuzberg) provides a platform for experimental, creative and intercultural activities. There, the idea of a gallery has been expanded during a search for new ways of exhibiting and performing art. One such example was the organising of an art show at the basement floor of a block of flats, and another one is continuous participation in a multidisciplinary improvisation called 'Cue' in Berlin.
Exhibition of B&W Pictures by Swiss Photographer Bruno
From July 27 to August 2, the Shed in the South End of Andrejsala featured an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Bruno (Geneva, Switzerland). The collection was titled 'Common Stuff'.
Those who attended the exhibition's unveiling were also treated a party as they were enjoying the rhythms of deejays Elvi, Mārcis Miķelsons and Red. On a somewhat sportier note, a biking show 'Velo Fakel' and a bicycle drag race were carrying on for the entire festive night in Andrejsala.
Exhibition of Paintings by Ogata Samoletova
From July 29 until August 3, an exhibition of artwork by the younger-generation artist Ogata Samoletova took place at the Theatre of Dreaming, located in the Power Shop of Andrejsala. In parallel with the exhibition, there continued a book sale.
The choice of imagery and storylines help the artist convey her emotions, dreams, longings and fantasies, therefore the spectators could easily discern and remember Samoletova's watercolours for the dynamic and vibrant colour schemes. She also often chooses her compositions to appear as if flat, thus in a sense harking back to children's drawings. In other words, there is perhaps a tinge of naïve art in Ogata's paintings – and yet, a message not just of naïveté but also of a certain symbolism is present.
Forest Adventure: Reshaping the Lab
In late July, the Andrejsala Lab underwent a makeover of its contents and, to some extent, of its ideology: Forest Adventure, an installation/exhibition created by artists Lita Liepa and Kate Krolle and running until the Rīga town festival on the 17th of August, changed both the inside and the outside of the building.
Just by taking a peek at the decorated windows, the visitors were impressed with a feeling that the forest has prevailed – right here in the heart of Rīga, not far from the Daugava. The Lab's façade was adorned with birdhouses, from which there came morphed sounds of birdsongs. Reaching the upper floor of the premises of Pilsētas laboratorija added the ultimate touch of wild nature: not only there were antlers in the staircase but also an abundance of other typical forest items made from wood as well as forest pictures in the background.
