Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear
Latvian Museum of Photography, 2019
This body of work explores the relationships between collective and personal memories by looking at the community surrounding a textile mill, now closed, of which my family was a part. The story of one small community is set in the larger context of post-industrial cities worldwide, as they seek new identities. As an exhibition, it depicts a mill filled by powerful rhythms of looms and lively collectives of women workers that, in today’s competitive world seems like a bright and distant dream. I focused on women, with a heightened sensitivity towards social and political matters in post-Soviet culture.
As the daughter of a textile designer, I spent my childhood at the mill, drawing fabric patterns and dreaming about the same job my mother had. I try to interweave my mother’s work, my childhood dreams and their failures with the workers’ collective ones to underline the division between personal and collective memories that together form our historical narratives.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the lyrics of ‘March of Enthusiasts’, the main song from for a Soviet movie ‘The Bright Way’ (Alexandrov, 1940), starring Lubov Orlova in the role of a female weaver, who made her ‘Cinderella’ journey from peasant to stakhanovite, a heroic worker. This line of the song was later censored because of doubt raised by the word ‘unclear’.
The museum is located in a historical building, which has some small reminders of its past, a formerly privately owned house. So, with my site-specific work ‘Mapping My Mother’ I got an opportunity to bring the histories of the building and the mill together. For this work I chose a room, where the remains of hand-painted wallpaper, which often left ignored. With the similar colour selection, borrowed from the old wallpapers, I tried to bring those two histories together in my installation and give an appreciation to the existed histories of the building.
The text, written by curator Inga Lace (Latvia) for the exhibition can be found here.
The exhibition was part of Riga Photomonth main programme.