PERFORMATIVE WALK: UNCOMFORTABLE MONUMENTS

On November 1, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) will conclude its 25th anniversary programme, “Time, Dawn or a Passing Train”, with a performative walk entitled “Inconvenient Monuments”. Since May, the programme has invited participants to take part in walks and urban expeditions in Riga, Alūksne, and Helsinki. 

This event focuses on monuments related to both the distant and recent past, as well as current social and political events, and is part of the recent controversy surrounding the “revision” of public space by dismantling controversial monuments. The artists involved in the walk will focus on monuments dedicated to specific historical figures and events, as well as the broader context of remembrance, commemoration, and memorial sites. 

Monuments and memorial sites from the occupation period in particular have become places where the present and the past meet and clash. As signs of social and cultural memory, they form dense cultural layers in the city and bear witness to different political regimes and times. As a result of regime changes and dramatic events such as war, these signs of memory and their meanings are also reinterpreted, rejected, demolished, or removed from public space.

During the walk, performative interventions will be created by the artists Gundega Evelone, Tanel Rander, Ivars Drulle, Maria Kapajeva, and Jaana Kokko. The artists will map the city through monuments that have become the subject of polarized opinions about what to do with this heritage, and they will invite us to see a more complex picture than that expressed by political and ideological arguments about them.

Programme of the walk 
1 November
15:00–18:30

Gundega Evelone, “My Monument”
Freedom Boulevard alley near Kalpaka Boulevard, Tērbatas and Merķeļa Street
(coordinates: 56°57’10.3″N 24°06’55.4″E)

Tanel Rander, “The guillotine effect: Barclay de Tolly”
Esplanāde Park, at the site where the monument to General Barklay de Tolly was dismantled

Ivars Drulle, “Reinterpretation”
Kronvalda Park, near the monument to writer Andrejs Upīts

Marija Kapajeva, “Threading with red, Part 2”
Kronvalda Park, opposite the Ukrainian Embassy

Jaana Kokko
Performative conversation and screening of the experimental film “Green Land” (2024) at the Kino Bize cinema (37–2 Elizabetes Street)

About performances

Gundega Evelone’s performance “My monument” focuses on the relationship between power and artists in the process of commissioning and creating monuments. “A commissioner of monuments in a city commissions a memorial not only to the person being commemorated, but also to themselves. It is the desire of those in power to mark public territory and to use exclusive rights to shared resources. Those who carry out the commissions—the artists—also have a special power relationship with monuments. Winning a competition and creating a lasting environmental object means reaching the next level of recognition. Well-thought-out and well-paid public art competitions are rare, and even those often end without results. They are cruel hunger games for artists, created by a chronic lack of resources. However, for many, the reward seems to be worth it.”

Tanel Rander’s performance “The guillotine effect: Barclay de Tolly” will focus on the monument to Barclay de Tolly, which was removed from Esplanāde Park in October 2024. He will highlight several concepts related to monuments and commemoration that have become particularly relevant after 2022, and will compare the monuments to de Tolly in Riga and his hometown Tartu. “The guillotine effect refers to the post-socialist transformation, where bronze heads were falling so that the real ones could stay and develop new democracies. The heads were falling as the wind of change was blowing. Such symbolic castration can be part of rituals of change. And right now, another change is taking place. That’s a challenge for public monuments that have to fulfill the controversial needs of a society. They must stand up and fall down at the same time. Perhaps we need the monuments to be more flexible? Perhaps we need a stage instead of a pedestal?”

Ivars Drulle’s intervention “Reinterpretation” is dedicated both to the monument to writer Andrejs Upīts and the confrontational opinions on its future. It also takes in a broader view of possible solutions that would not remove but rather see “uncomfortable” monuments in a new light. “There are two common ways of dealing with unwanted monuments. The first is the simplest—to destroy or dismantle and hide them. The second way is to make them inconspicuous, invisible, to create obstacles to seeing or visiting the monument. The third way is reinterpretation—giving the monument a different meaning, allowing it to be seen in a new light. Contrary to concealment, the monument is revived in a way—no longer as its previous image, but as a symbol that embodies other values.”

Maria Kapajeva’s work “Threading with red, Part 2” will be a collective, site-specific performance created in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. It is part of a series of works that address the mass displacement caused by the war and the fact that many Ukrainian refugees fled to neighboring countries, including Estonia and Latvia.
Kapayeva’s practice is rooted in the personal stories of ordinary people that, when interwoven, shape our collective understanding of large-scale historical events. Rather than focusing on the heroic narratives often immortalized in monuments, she seeks to give visibility to those who are usually forgotten—ordinary people, particularly women. In this performance, the artist will create a symbolic boat form in a public space using red thread, while the participants read aloud the story of a single family from Mariupol. As a temporary monument it highlights a singular story—a thin thread—and how, together, such threads must be remembered when confronting histories that repeat, in the hope of breaking the cycle.

Artist Jaana Kokko’s intervention will be a performative conversation and a screening of her experimental film Green Land (2024) at the Kino Bize cinema. It was shot in the Latvian countryside, in Lādezera parish and Limbaži, and in it the three main characters—former kolkhoz workers Irēna, Veronika, and Lūcija—talk about their experiences in the kolkhozes Ausma and Komunārs. However, the main image of the film is the sculpture Kolhozniece [Collective farm worker], created in 1952 by sculptor Rasma Bruzīte, which personifies both personal and collective memory. While searching for references to monuments in Latvia that depict women, especially kolkhoz workers, the artist came across an archive photo of this Stalin-era sculpture, taken in the Limbaži area. One of the protagonists of Green Land remembered both this sculpture and where it was moved during the de-Stalinization period after its dismantling—the family whose garden the sculpture is located in renamed it Little Milda or Little Milda, who changes her skirts.

Image: Jaana Kokko. Film still. Green land, 2024, 30 min