It is necessary to begin with a disclaimer. I curated Survival Kit in and now, for the first time, I am enjoying the festival from the position of the visitor and of a friend. As the festival opened, curator Alicia Knock described the premises behind the title of the festival Long-Distance Friendships.
It functions not as a theme but as a way of looking at the relationships that occur naturally in research-based international artistic practices. The complex mesh of friendships artistic, intellectual, intimate, personal, economic, and political is investigated by the festival through the ideological and economic alliance put in place between the USSR and Eastern Bloc with African and Latin American countries during the Cold War.
These alliances — perpetuated through grants, student and worker exchanges and inter-nations funding; forms of soft power — shaped the contamination between cultural community and long-lasting economic benefits.
A curatorial choice that comments on the attempt of the Soviet Bloc to create a horizontal economic approach, which promoted the mutual growth and nourishment of the participating nations. These are reflected by the exhibition venue: the Vidzeme Market, a section known for the sale of butter, sauerkraut, and flowers, built in Riga in Meandering through old butcher and cheese stalls, the artworks produce a bold thesis spanning from historical examples of friendships formed in the Soviet Union, non-Western contemporary feminist and queer decolonial practices, to works that document the influence of Soviet education on African culture and cinema.
This work stems from the encounter between the artist and Dr. From his personal archive of uncanny images of student life — which would not be different from those of Western universities today — with young people from all over the globe, the idea of an isolated and uniform population in the USSR is dispelled.
