What Kind of Fame You Have

2015

The video is an exploration of the ideas around how the rooted and preserved traditions could affect the women nowadays and if there is a possibility for a reconnection between past and present. I set an one-off experiment with a Latvian local community of ‘suiti’ women who have an unique quality to sing ‘drone gossips’ as part of their preserved traditions. The gossips were sung by women only due to their ‘low-graded’ quality, which was inappropriate for men, as a tradition states.  

I invited modern women to join the ‘suiti’ ones for gossiping about them. The improvisation the ‘suiti’ women sing about the other ones happened special for the camera without prior rehearsal. The impossibility of today’s women to respond to the ‘gossips’ in the same way arises questions around the impossibility to preserve traditions since the time passes and the relevance of the old traditions to nowadays culture.

The video was produced during the workshop run by Jim Goldberg (USA) at International Summer School of Photography (ISSP) in Latvia.