How to become Latvian?: Photography

Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts

27.9.09

Album 6: My way home

An opera of love on Stabu iela and (...)

... the pain of fading love next to my apartment. Shakespearean dramas behind silent nightly city walls...

Artists and writers make soup twice every evening this week. Yesterday, the writer Pauls Bankovskis invited to a bean soup. Blaumana Street 10 has indeed turned into a warm-hearted meeting place in these chilly autumn evenings. Thanks to Katrina Neiburga and Agnese Krivade, who organize this art project.

All over real estate premises emptied by the economic crisis, there are exciting and interesting art projects to be visited these days. Altogether, the event is called "Survival Kit", organized by the Centre for Contemporary Art, and it's open until Sunday this week.

One part of the project is an art book shop and exhibition space, where every evening at 18:30, new workshops are held (by Urs Lehni, Lex Trüb, Egija Inzle and Maya Wismer). One of the funniest things for me still is, again and again, reading the Latvianized names of authors on the book covers, trying to guess which author is behind this local pseudonym.

P.S.: In order to be able to decline names in Latvian langauge, they are all written in a Latvian form. Thus Alice Cooper becomes Eliss Kūpers - with a long u that looks like "ū". And the famous secret agent 007 becomes Džeimss Bonds...

Album 4: Hooligans

This is a photo of two Latvian hooligans. They were at the last game in October 2008, when the Latvian team lost 1:2 against the Swiss. Yesterday evening I walked through the Old Town in Riga, which was full of Swiss... hearing "Hopp švīc!" and "Du, lueg einiš dā, heš das meitli gsē." and "Du, mier sind bim štīk haoss!"... I could almost get paranoid!

Latvians are well known to be the most enthusiastic ice-hockey fans in the world, and right now they're suffering with their basketball team at the European Basketball Championships in Poland, and they're waiting for tonight's most important football game of the year for the World Cup Qualification... against whom the latter is played? Oh, it's of course against Switzerland.

So I think it's a good time to calm down these nerves and look at a friendly sport that is usually happening far away from the spotlight of attention: Rugby.

I had a chance to see the game of last year's champions EŽI/EK Sistēma against their younger team EŽI/LMT, in a "stadium" in a forest in the suburb of Jugla. The highest (and only) rugby leage in Latvia has exactly four teams.

My old friend Martins (phon: Martinjsch) plays with the older "Hedgehogs" (Eži, phon: Eschi). We know each other from hours of futile hitchhiking attempts somewhere in the Latvian hinterland. He was more successful in New Zealand, where he participated in a Rugby exchange program. Pretty great, I'd say: To practice and play for five months in a country where Rugby is about as important as ice-hockey is in Latvia. Martins told me that even on the schoolyard, girls and boys would play Rugby during the breaks.

This is Kristaps. He performed best in this game, had the most "tries", and could therefore frequently get a "conversion" with a kick to the goal. A try is 5 points, a conversion 2 points. Since Kristaps' old team went bankrupt, he drives twice or thrice a week the 60 km from the city of Jelgava to this Riga suburb for Rugby. Very passionate!

Martins and his Sistēma-Hedgehogs won the game 67:17. My congratulations!

How I found my cap...

...sell-out

Album 2: Latvian landscape, 00:35 AM

Album 1: Night market

Where potato sellers dream of wealth, or just a softer mattress. Where sleepwalkers sell crates of vegetables to night people. That's where I sit sleeplessly in front of my 50 grams of Black Balzam drink, in a nameless night café, with a hundred scallions on my table. And I become one more shadow within this parallel society. Maybe I just discovered the most wonderful place in Riga.