the banks of certain rivers | rucka

when you touch a place you touch a place
resting on it, seeking its dents.
putting your weight on a place
asking it to hold you.

When I wrote these lines I was in another country, in another residency. It was a more mountainous place and I envisioned a climber searching the surface of a rock, relying on touch alone, hands and feet continuously scanning the surface for dents and cracks for support. This morning, I woke up in Rucka, in Cēsis, in Latvia. And those lines were in my mind. For Cēsis holds me.

It did take a while to find the cracks. I am convinced a month-long residency is too short, in almost all cases. Take two, take three. You need time to land somewhere – at least I do.

The town of Cēsis is surrounded by Gauja national park, named after the river snaking, seemingly calm but ever-changing, through the forest. I was warned against her whirlpools. It did take a while to find the shortcuts to the forest. To Gauja, Cīrulīši, Ninieris, Ērgļu Klintis. The font of this website warps when I feed it the Latvian alphabet. But you’ll need the letters with their tails and wriggles, to represent the long vowels and intricate movements of the tongue.

photo by Aleksandrs Muiznieks

photo by Aleksandrs Muiznieks

One day I joined a walk to the river, together with colleague Michael McLoughlin, that was organised by the municipality. It was centered on the history of Cēsis and the surrounding area as a place for healing. The water has been said to heal. The smell of pine trees. The views. It’s easy to see a healing quality, to feel it in the air. We walked for hours and more often than I can count a building was casually pointed out as a former sanatorium, a former hospital, a clinic for soldiers, a school for sick children.

Rucka, the residency where I am now living and working, is one of these places. Though originally built as a manor house, during the first world war it served as an infirmary for soldiers, and from the second world war until 2005 (!) it was a tuberculosis sanatorium. It is a building hard to describe. There’s two huge verandas, windows all around, offering beautiful views of the park. Fading green walls. More square meters than its current residents (six artists + some staff and guests coming and going) can use, though we do try and, as the weeks passed, have spread to most corners, filling tables with masks, plaster and fresh prints from the darkroom, filling floors with photocopies. There’s furnaces in the thick walls, and cold days are spent feeding the fire and seeking each other out to share warmth, cakes, music and movies.

One of the great pleasures here for me was working in a darkroom again. Like going back to your mother… to the core, to the magic, the essence of photography. Kaspars, one of the founders of Rucka Residency, has gathered enlargers and equipment from all over Europe to create this little lab; a true paradise. There’s a sound system in there and this means I am literally singing and dancing in darkroom joy. I continued a long-term project On being ill, on the complex relationship between language and pain, and it was special to see what I could do with these negatives, to truly play with them. Also, I decided to make prints by hand for each and every one of my paper newsletters.

Right next to the darkoom there is a room, currently filled with photographic equipment, that still bears the sign ‘Injection Room‘. With the help of Līna, Rucka’s manager, I am meeting Rucka’s former patients and doctors. I begin to recognize the Latvian slimība, slimnīca, slims. Sickness, the place for the sick, the sick. Their stories sound like fiction or magic realism at times and it is baffling to believe they did happen here, where I am sitting right now.

There used to be around fifty patients here. In my room, three or four beds. In the verandas, ten to twelve. The serious cases were put together and often locked in. In Soviet times there was work therapy, darba therapija, of which I found some archival photographs displayed on wooded panels that we unearthed from a shed, as well as one remaining hospital bed, bearing witness.

There are the death stories, as well as the cure stories. In the tower, straight across from my room, a coffin and a horse were always kept ready, awaiting the next person to die. Once there was a girl who came in coughing blood. She went to the toilet and never came out. Once there was a man who wanted to drink alcohol. He was locked in on the first floor, tried to escape through the window and died in the fall. The other day, I met a woman who was admitted here as a patient when she was 16. She was told she could pick out her coffin, she would not be around much longer. But she healed, and since tuberculosis was written all over her papers, many schools rejected her. She then went to study in the nurse school, where she met again the doctor who treated her at Rucka sanatorium, who invited her to work here. She was a nurse here for thirty-five years since, and could tell me stories both from the patient and from the nurse-perpective. Though she raised her eyebrows when asked, she allowed me to photograph her. With another patient, equally full of stories, I was not so lucky. I cannot be photographed. I have no name, no surname and no age.

The history of Rucka is a specific, local one. These walls, these floors, that’s where this happened. But to zoom out a bit, the history of Latvia in itself has astounded me since coming here. How little are we aware of this country in the privileged, safe countries some kilometers further west. An eye-opener in this have been the writings by anthropologist Vieda Skultans, brought to my attention by Ieva, another founder of Rucka Residency. In an essay titled Narratives of displacement and identity, Skultans writes for example of exile; trimda, in Latvian, using narratives of people who returned to Latvia after being deported to Siberia. Trimda also meant that everything of importance had happened elsewhere and earlier. Authentic time and experience belonged to the remembered past. Inauthentic routine time belonged to the present. She speaks of people who continue to live in an unreal present and a real past. In another text, a chapter titled Damaged lives, damaged health, she writes of the consequences of Latvian history on both mental and physical wellbeing: The incoherence of lives is equated with illness. Here too, she uses narratives, drawing upon long interviews with her countrymen and -women, and concludes that although narratives start with illness, they move on to address social and historical issues.

A memorable day in my time here was the day I visited the exhibition Sirdsapzinas Ugunskurs / Burning Conscience, in Cēsis, initiated and curated by Elīna Kalniņa. It tells the story of the resistance during the occupations by the Soviets, Germans, and Soviets once more, focussing on the years 1939 - 1957. (Latvia only regained indepence in 1991.) When trying to find words for how much I appreciated this exhibition I am reminded of a note by author Octavia Butler: Tell stories filled with facts, she wrote. Make people touch and taste and KNOW. Make people FEEL! FEEL! FEEL! This is what this exhibition does and I recommend every creature on this earth to visit it. Both the facts and the feelings are conveyed truly and strongly. Housed in a building where the KGB temporarily held a prison, stories of resisting Latvians are told using audio, text and archival photographs and documents. In one of these cells I had my first ‘encounter’ with Kārlis Zariņš, a local partisan who lived in the forest from 1945 – 1953 and, during this time, photographed himself. His photographs show the act of living (cooking, reading, developing film) in the forest, in a time and place when just living your life in itself was an act of resistance. During the Soviet occupation thousands of people moved into the forest, surviving as best as they could in tents and bunkers. I was more deeply moved by Kārlis’ photographs than I have been in a long time. Hearing and reading about the conditions of the forest brothers, known here as mežabrāļi,, this was a unimaginably tough life, which included running, starving, freezing, narrowly escaping being shot like an animal in the woods, again and again. Yet his photographs are the quiet moments and they have a staged, performative quality. His hair is carefully combed. He is proudly demonstrating to us how he lived despite everything, it seems.

After talking again and again with Elīna, who is an amazing support and inspiration in this, I am looking into the possibilities of making an art project with/on/of/about Kārlis Zariņš and his photographs. At the moment I am experimenting with a few things visually, such as this little video here, where I ‘developed’ the photograph of him developing his film in the forest, and the one below, where I placed a photograph of his in a photograph of mine.

The source material for this video is property of the Latvian State Archives.

Karlis’ photograph is property of the Latvian State Archives.

I need to give more time to this, and care. To understand these stories, this history. I visited a reproduction of a mežabrāļu bunker some days ago and I am reading all testimonies I can find by people who lived in the forest. In an excerpt of a translation by Kaija Straumanis of Sanita Reinsone’s Mežā Meitas (Forest Daughters) a woman exclaims in her incredible story: It was true! I lived with wolves for nine years - and seven with the deer. I don’t know how to talk to people! I need time get my head around this. To see what it can mean for me.

photo by Paula Jansone at ISSP

photo by Paula Jansone at ISSP

And so, this residency feels very much like a beginning, several things slowly opening up. It has been good to share some of my thoughts at a beautiful place for photography in the capital, ISSP Riga, which sparked some interesting conversations with local photographers. I have felt some anxiety about time passing too quickly and projects having their own pace, but now I am at peace. For I will be back. When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers, wrote Czesław Miłosz. And I will. And certain forests, I might add! Paldies Latvija!