Riga
Some time ago, IVARS GRAVLEJS and PETRA PĚTILETÁ decided to leave for Riga for one year. Ivars‘s origin are in Riga and he, therefore, wanted to rediscover the city of his childhood. The duo has moved into a new flat, Ivars found a job and both so became a part of this city.The exhibition RIGA is operating on a border of travel diary, reportage photography, social document and artist intervention. The work of Ivars Gravlejs and Petra Pětiletá are typical in their improvisation quality, expressed in the lightness of the finals shapes (but also the lightness with which they appropriate). At the RIGA exhibition we can find a complex view upon the baltic capital from the perspective of an artist duo which spent in Riga one year of their lives.
- Riga is Paris of the East. You can read that00:00:14.797
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- in every brochure promoting tourism00:00:19.797
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- or the sale of plane tickets.00:00:24.841
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- So Riga is Paris of the East00:00:28.546
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- and it has a lot of Art Nouveau architecture.00:00:32.046
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- However, the center is very small.00:00:36.463
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- Those ugly Art Nouveau buildings00:00:40.030
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- were built by Eisenstein's father.00:00:43.530
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- We also took some photos of cats.00:00:47.030
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- Yeah, that was cool.00:00:50.627
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- One day at the beginning of our relationship,00:00:54.546
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- Ivars got drunk and asked me to go to Riga with him,00:00:58.651
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- to live there for a year. And it really happened.00:01:04.928
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- Of course, I was amazed by everything.00:01:10.889
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- I remember one funny situation.00:01:15.855
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- We would go to the market every day00:01:19.355
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- and after some two months, Petra went all crazy00:01:23.267
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- over a Czech bike she saw. She felt like in a vacuum00:01:27.767
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- so it made her happy to see a Czech bike.00:01:33.332
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- - What was its name? - Eska, I think.00:01:37.898
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- It's true that the Latvians don't talk to foreigners.00:01:41.355
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- They're even worse than Czech people.00:01:47.042
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- Nobody ever wants to talk to you.00:01:51.022
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- I'd like to say that each of our exhibited works00:01:54.522
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- has a slightly different aspect.00:02:00.162
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- But after much thinking, I found out00:02:05.561
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- that what they have in common is an existential approach.00:02:10.750
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- Toghether, we went through the worst moments of our lives,00:02:16.292
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- worse than anything else.00:02:22.430
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- My experience from Riga was a nightmare.00:02:25.916
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- It was very disappointing, an existential disillusion.00:02:30.416
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- Riga is full of contrasts.00:02:37.054
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- When you ride a bus, the left side is clean00:02:41.253
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- but the right side is a mess.00:02:46.253
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- The contrasts are only a few meters away.00:02:49.790
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- If you live there, it becomes normal.00:02:55.066
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- The people are also very materialistic.00:02:59.214
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- Half of the inhabitants are Russians,00:03:03.212
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- the other half are Latvians.00:03:07.212
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- It's a post-modern environment.00:03:10.716
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- And also one that degrades you00:03:14.898
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- and makes you feel like you live under a...00:03:18.398
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- ...what is it called? - A lid.00:03:22.898
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- In the film "They Live" by John Carpenter from 1985,00:03:26.533
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- there's a transmitter making people blind to aliens.00:03:32.422
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- In Riga, there's a transmitter making people fall asleep.00:03:37.914
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- Yes, that's quite peculiar. Riga is a true Sleepy Hollow.00:03:43.976
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- At first, it looks like a nice, quiet place.00:03:49.882
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- But later you discover that it's in fact motionless.00:03:55.577
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- It makes you sleep much longer than here.00:04:01.555