Baba, kuru škārsteikla bārni vaira napīdzeivuos

Description

Baba, kuru škārsteikla bārni vaira napīdzeivuos is a quiet yet radical meditation on memory, domesticity, and the invisible labor of elder women in the rural landscapes of Latgale. It emerges at the intersection of documentary intimacy and speculative aesthetics.

At its core is Valentīna Priževoite—a 75-year-old woman from the Latgale countryside—whose everyday gestures, tools, and silences are captured through Amanda Anusāne’s photographic lens. Her camera does not intrude; it observes. Over time, the subject and the photographer form a pact of quiet mutuality, revealing a life in patterns: knitting, measuring blood pressure, recording milk yields in careful script. These seemingly mundane acts become rituals of resistance against oblivion.

Alongside these photographs, Liāna Mērņaka constructs an immersive spatial environment from the material remnants of rural life: a milk can, a pressure gauge, a dog-eared notebook. These objects are not presented as relics but as living interfaces—portals into the world of a generation whose stories are increasingly overwritten by algorithmic noise and digital forgetfulness.

The exhibition embraces the tension between analogue and synthetic memory. AI-generated imagery weaves through the documentation not to replace reality, but to echo it—raising questions about authorship, ethics, and the fate of oral history in the age of machine learning. The Latgalian language, embedded throughout the textual elements, reinforces the work’s resistance to linguistic homogenization, insisting on the specificity and survival of place.

This is not a nostalgic gesture, but an urgent one. Baba... does not seek to monumentalize the grandmother as myth, but to insist on her reality—fragile, particular, and deeply entangled in the cultural and social fabric of Latgale. It is an act of re-mapping a lineage that refuses erasure.

The exhibition embraces the tension between analogue and synthetic memory. AI-generated imagery weaves through the documentation not to replace reality, but to echo it—raising questions about authorship, ethics, and the fate of oral history in the age of machine learning. The Latgalian language, embedded throughout the textual elements, reinforces the work’s resistance to linguistic homogenization, insisting on the specificity and survival of place.

This is not a nostalgic gesture, but an urgent one. Baba... does not seek to monumentalize the grandmother as myth, but to insist on her reality—fragile, particular, and deeply entangled in the cultural and social fabric of Latgale. It is an act of re-mapping a lineage that refuses erasure.