LAUKKU - artistic residency in Ladezers, Latvia

Description

I spend three days in the village of Ladezers, and collaborated with the Latvian dance critic and philosopher Inta Balode. I made a film with her, activating suriashi-marche féminine and Doreen Massey's theory as my main methodology.

The Latvian word lauku refers to the countryside. The Finnish word laukku means bag or suitcase. (Both words are pronounced the same way, with an extended k.) Peripheria and mobility are the two fundamental elements of our collective. We are an international group with members from Latvia, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany and England, and we do collective work, so everything always begins with traveling. We also travel from centers to the ‘periphery’. We believe there are unforeseen artistic potentials outside of the centers, which do not meet the institutional expectations and needs of the centers. LAUKKU cultivates regional art and philosophy by engaging with rural outsider artists, hillbilly audiences, nature and the material resources of the countryside. We do not have any special interest to present our results in the centers. We believe that there is truly a new life to be found in the geographical margins, and that includes in the future a new institutional framework. LAUKKU is yeast, all over the cultural dough of the life of the villages, forests and small towns, boosting the organic growth of regional cultural formations, criteria, critique, research and institutional rhizomes. We want to be productive like yogurt, bread root and blue cheese (cultures of mold) – glocal, cosmopolite and regional at the same time.

Period	25 Feb 2018 → 28 Feb 2018