Riga Architecture Today; The breakdown and build-up of the Latvian capital
Exhibition:Travel is easy these days. From weekend breaks to stag and hen jaunts, a 3-4 day break in another city, another country and another culture is easily bought - not just in monetary terms but also in time.
What is it to look, see, experience and record in this context? To some of us, these questions may seem primary school basic. To others, these are the loaded questions of contemporary visual practice - questions with consequences.
The exhibition Riga Architecture Today; The breakdown and build-up of the Latvian capital, is the result of a collaborative effort between Viewfinder Photography Gallery and students from Goldsmiths University's Photography and Urban Culture MA course. Exhibited is the work of 10 graduates inspired by a group visit to Riga in May 2006. Further details can be found at www.riga-architexture.com
Where many of us would point our cameras towards vistas and companions, The Riga Collective have directed theirs towards a description of individual Urban Culture. Formally part of the Soviet Union, and having recently joined the European Union, Riga is a city in flux, undergoing rapid transformation, the 'Paris of the Baltic' with its art nouveaux architecture and timber building, and displaying both Latvian nationalism and Soviet 'internationalism.' Buildings are going up and coming down and as the city literally morphs, so too may its social structure.
The photographs presented here show impressions of the textures of the city from the back streets, alley ways, school yards, in the medieval centre, in the cavernous interiors of art nouveau cinemas, noticing the writing on the walls of the city, the ghostly traces of the soviet past and the imaginings of the Riga to come. The building structures are the nests, the casings, the foundations, walls and finally the shells of urban existence. Here are the discarded, the regenerated and the in-between.
By exploring alternative modes of urban representation, not just post-Soviet photojournalistic styles, and by recording and displaying the material nature of a city, can we gain an insightful understanding of its personality? We might see this as a type of portraiture in amongst the changing faces of Europe and a comment on a loaded history, its decay and preservation.
We hope that this project will foster and initiate new relationships between London and Riga and further the photographic theory of representing cities by building working relationships with each other and arts communities.