Kristīne Upīte’s solo exhibition “Gentle Primality” in Andris Eglītis’ “Cube No. 4” as part of Savvaļa’s 6th season visual arts program. The premise of the Cube No. 4 exhibitions is to collaborate with the artworks and artefacts from previous shows. “Gentle Primality” took place alongside works by Ieva Putniņa, Laimdota Malle, and Aleksejs Beļeckis.

Photo: Kristīne Upīte

Savvaļa’s 6th season visual arts program is financially supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation (VKKF).

A sculpture Seed (2025) by Liene Mackus for Savvaļa outdoor exhibition is developed with the financial support by State Culture Capital foundation (VKKF). The artist expresses gratitude to to Artūrs Arnis and Andris Eglītis for the support in creation of the new work. 

Photo: Aleksejs Beļeckis

“Like a Jellyfish in the Sun” is a sensual, ritual space - an experience of in-betweenness and transition, where the viewer is invited to transcend the visible and invisible boundaries, becoming a participant in the process of transformation. It is a place where nature and man meet not hierarchically, but in dialogue - between sun and shadow, shell and light, between life and decay. The title of the exhibition - Like a Jellyfish in the Sun - becomes a metaphor for this existential liminal space, where the fragile, the changing, the living and the disappearing appear.

Laimdota Malle, Aleksejs Beļeckis and Sarma Gabrēna work with subtle signs of transformation - shell, fragility, moisture, drying, growth and decomposition. Care is an essential part of this work, not as romanticised ecology, but as acceptance: sometimes form can fail, colour can burn, sound can disappear. It is not control over the process, but participation in it.

Through painterly gestures, performative elements, material transformations and sound space, a mythical "Savvaļa Temple" is created in which a cycle of rebirth takes place. The space is perceived as a shrine of dawn - a reference to the ancient H₂éwsōs, the goddess of dawn, and the Latvian Austra - symbolising man's constant striving for growth, transformation and rebirth. It explores feminine materiality - caring, carrying life, initiating possibilities - while also recognising the potential for failure, decay, decay as a necessary part of the cycle.

The installation works as a liminal space: neither here nor there - not yet and not anymore. It becomes a symbolic threshold to cross in order to enter a new world where the boundaries between the "natural" and the "human" are not clear. Here things are transformed - into spills, into stagnation, into the cries of whales, into fields of daisies being cut - all part of the cyclical cooperation and conflict between nature and a man. Painting meets material wisdom, light meets movement, the living meets memory, song meets scratching.

The space becomes a place where time stands still and resurrection is experienced before it begins - where loss has not yet occurred, but peace has already arrived. It is a place where one can see one's own vanishing essence, let it flow like light through water. It offers not answers, but the possibility to experience - like a jellyfish in the sun - transparent, vulnerable, full of life, exposed to the light and its devastatingly healing power.

Photographed by Aleksejs Beļeckis

Supported by State Culture Capital Foundation (VKKF)

On June 7, as part of the opening event for Savvaļa’s sixth season, Andris Eglītis’ latest installation “Cube No. 4” and Ieva Putniņa’s solo exhibition “Glass in the Cube” were unveiled. Cube No. 4 is part of Eglītis’ self-initiated visual art program “A Sheltered Space”. Within this program, various artists are invited to create inhabitable artworks. Reflecting on the many possible relationships between the viewer and the artwork, these pieces are meant to be experienced over time—perhaps even overnight.

At the same time, A Sheltered Space responds to Savvaļa’s character as an inspiring residency site. These artworks are created within the framework of artist residencies and also serve as temporary shelters for visitors and residents, encouraging a more transcendent experience. The Cube is a yearly installation/construction by Andris Eglītis that changes its form, function, and meaning each season. This year, it has transformed into a space where other artists can reside and use it as both a residency studio and an exhibition venue.

The first resident of the Cube was artist Ieva Putniņa, who created a new series of works—working with glass for the first time. The result is a set of new pieces forming her solo exhibition “Glass in the Cube”.

The installation Cube No. 4 and Putniņa’s exhibition were created in collaboration with Tils Zigmunds Ozoliņš, Oto Holgers Ozoliņš, Mārtiņš Sarvuts, Toms Musts, and Pauls Jēgers.

Photographed by Aleksejs Beļeckis

The creation of new works and Savvaļa’s visual arts program in its sixth season are supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme and the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia (VKKF).

The new works by Ieva Putniņa and Andris Eglītis are part of the project SPACE: Sustainable Production for Artistic Communities in Europe, and the events included in the project are funded by the European Union.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Solo exhibition by ieva Putniņa at the "Cube nr.4" by Andris Eglītis.

Photographed by Aleksejs Beļeckis

The creation of new works and Savvaļa’s visual arts program in its sixth season are supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme and the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia (VKKF).

The new works by Ieva Putniņa and Andris Eglītis are part of the project SPACE: Sustainable Production for Artistic Communities in Europe, and the events included in the project are funded by the European Union.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Dāvis Ozols' first solo exhibition "Zālē" at the exhibition pavilion The Grey Cube.

Photo Emils Lacums

Photo Emils Lacums

Foto Emīls Lacums

Photo: Emīls Lacums

Exactly 300 km from Savvaļa, in the forest lies a boat just like the one in Savvaļa, entangled in trees, surrounded by grass and small bushes. It is not clear how it ended up here. The nearest coast is more than 100 kilometers away. The size of the boat and the inscription “Mazirbe” indicate that it was used for sea fishing. Since the deck boards have partially disappeared, the frame of the boat is visible. It resembles the rotting, long-dead body of a forest beast. But this is not the end. The wreck of the boat has become a place to spend the night. It is possible to understand how this boat ended up here in your sleep. I have heard stories about incredible rainstorms that washed the boat here, and there are also stories about a fisherman who could not leave his boat, so he dragged it with him until he lost strength and had to leave it in the thick of the forest.

Savvaļa's fifth season resident artist sculptor Oto Holgers Ozoliņš created the work "Mazirbe - Savvaļa 300 km" in the frame of the visual art program "Shelter". As part of the program, initiated and curated by Andris Eglītis, several authors are invited to create various inhabitable works of art. Thinking about the various possible relationships between the viewer and the artwork, these works invite you to experience them for a long time, perhaps even to the afterlife. At the same time, "Shelter" responds to Savvaļa's characteristic of being an inspiring place for residencies, which is why these works of art are created within the framework of artist residencies and also serve as accommodations for visitors and residents, encouraging a more transcendental experience.

Photo: Aleksejs Beļeckis

Made possible with the financial support from Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation

The workshop/exhibition of color pigment extracting from natural materials at the residency program “Skete of Savvaļa” by Inga Meldere and Mikko Hintz, open-air exhibition place Savvaļa. Artwork location - venue place “White Cube”. Dates: July 16 and throughout the summer of 2023. 

But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal! before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret. In this fragment, the young hero of Proust’s novel Du côté de chez Swann (or “Swan’s Way” in English translation) is trying to communicate with the blossoming hawthorns. But he can’t get the message, maybe because Western culture has ignored non-human beings, animals, and plants for so long. 

Plants may acquire artistic agency in collaboration with artists who are attentive and eager to engage in more-than-human relationships. An example of such an attitude and attentiveness to local Latvian plants is the creative workshop/exhibition of color pigment extraction from natural materials by Inga Meldere and Mikko Hintz. It also means the change of our human subjectivity, or, using the words of Rosi Braidotti from her book “The Posthuman,” As a brand of vital materialism, posthuman theory contests the arrogance of anthropocentrism and the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Human as a transcendental category. It strikes instead an alliance with the productive and immanent force of zoe, or life in its non-human aspects. This requires a mutation of our shared understanding of what it means to think at all, let alone think critically. To think at all or to think artistically and in a participatory way here means to engage in the process of extracting pigments from natural everyday materials, like trees, mushrooms, vegetables, and flowers. It questions the notion of male genius, which is the artistic counterpart of heroic political action, and challenges the myth of art production as a realm of magical authorship, connoisseur expertise, and techniques available only to “true masters”. There are no pictures hanging on the walls of a museum as a white cube – the white cube here is a tent in the wild, and the work table for pigment extraction is the true artwork.

Text: Jānis Taurens

Photos: Aleksejs Beļeckis

Support: Vidzeme planing region, VKKF, Frame Contemporary Finland

SKITS by Aleksejs Beļeckis with participation of Andris Eglītis, Elīna Silova, Sabīne Vernere and Alīse Vorobeja and opening performance by Elīna Silova and Kaspars Kurdeko happened in summer 2022 as the first indoor exhibition at the Grey Cube.

Saints did not become saints because they did something extraordinary, but because they did something ordinary extraordinarily well. In a short explanation the ancient Greek word “amerimnos” (ἀμέριμνος) ​​means liberation from anxiety, worries, freedom from worldly cares. In Christian asceticism “amerimnos” is associated with the practice of silence and is connected with Desert tradition and with sketes – a monastic communities in Eastern Christianity that allows relative isolation for monks, but also allows for communal services and the safety of shared resources and protection. But this silence and withdrawal from the world are not necessarily connected with physical or geographical location, but rather – a state of mind. According to the tradition of East Syrian mystics, this state is achieved when the mind localizes in the heart. A necessary step as neither the practice of silence nor hermitism has any meaning if they are cultivated without love. Through it, a state of inner silence, liberation from noise, is achieved. It is the listening of pure sound. Catholic theologian Josemaría Escrivá considered the main function of such silence to be the protection of a person’s inner life from the world’s empty talk.

Savvaļa, separated from the world by forests and mental distance, is a modern scete – a territory of filled silence, where many sounds coexist, but not the noise. Savvaļa’s first indoor exhibition in the Gray Cube is about silence or at least an attempt to be silent and to hear. A space organized for a moment, in which, when encountering a work of art, one not only looks, but also sees.

Artist duo Flo Kasearu (Estonia) and Elīna Vītola (Latvia) resided in Savvaļa at different times during the summer of 2022, creating the work "Sick" with the opening of the erected monument in Savvaļa on August 13, 2022. 

We erected statues, monuments of greatness and glory, commemorating war, victories over others – "bloodsucking parasites" – like there was any victories to begin with! Only loss, on either end. We carried accomplishments like badges, pierced through our chests; the powerfulness of an individual seemingly more important than our communities. 

That’s sick.

Sick is a life-sized, bronze sculpture of a tick, taking two forms. Ticks are ectoparasites, living on the surface of its hosts and feed on their blood. As ticks do, Sick latches itself on to the surface of a wooden sculpture and on to the skin of a human as a microdermal piercing. Small but resistant, it outwits and outlasts. There is a sense of taking over nature taking over: bronze as a material and the parasitic strategy of a tick resists the unpredictable forces of nature. 

Body modification such as piercings, are an act of resistance, a token of collectivity: a symbol of being part of a chosen community. Carrying surgical steel in and on our bodies is perhaps deviant to nature, even if our bodies are endlessly modified by nature within and outside our skins. Control comes in specifically with the human-centric urge to outplay the more-than-human conditions of our lives, through modification of human and non-human bodies and landscapes. 

Sick is an implant, that both belongs and creates fear. 

Sick is a monument, as is the skin you live in.

https://elinavitola.com/sick/

"(..) because the animal is incorrigible"

A 56 hours long residence and performance of film director Stanislav Tokalov and architect and painter Egija Smeile (Latvia). 

"In a grove of trees, out in the pristine countryside, for seven days eight hours a day and in silence using a shovel a man digs a pit in the ground with the hope of finding truth.

Around the pit, eleven cut-down tree trunks stand in a circle, mute witnesses, hostages of the event.

Humans dig holes when they want to grow something or build a house, create a pond but when they want to hide something or want to bury something they dig, too. If you know or think that something is buried you dig to find it. You might find a fossil, a bone that belonged to a living creature or something closer to your own space and time.

The trees surrounding this work are the permanent spectators, other witnesses, the ones who were here, are here now and will be here when the artists depart. In this case we dig to find truth, to dig down to it, to find what it is. And as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing said, “The truth itself is not interesting, but the search for it”. We are not sure if that is true.

All the participants: the cut-down tree trunks, the encircling trees and the viewing public are waiting, waiting…"

The situation offers a suspended moment in a remote space of the exhibition, where the artist invites one to spend time in an installation inspired by a figure whose powers have been celebrated but whose existence has been contested.

In the words of Agnese Krivade:

St. Christopher has been a misunderstanding since the outset.

St. Christopher ate human flesh and then he regretted it.

In the third century, an ugly 2.3-metre-tall man with a dog’s head roamed the world in search of the mightiest king. Having met many fake kings and masters, he gives up and starts to work as a human ferry, carrying people across the river on his shoulders. The people of Riga call him “Big Kristap” and recount that it all happened right here in the river Daugava (he must have been in many places at once).

Once, a tiny toddler asked to be carried across the river. The toddler turns out to be the heaviest and the mightiest king of them all. St. Christopher likes the child and becomes his follower. He is later tortured and killed for his refusal to renounce him.

In the seventh century, the popularity of St. Christopher the Martyr spreads, people saying he came from the tribe of dog-headed people who ate human flesh and barked. He becomes the saint of travellers, both in the Eastern and Western churches.

After a while, it turns out that the dog’s head has been a misunderstanding of translation (yes, it was Cananeus, not canineus) so the faulty icon is removed from churches and even banned sometimes. Now he appears with a human head.

In 1960, the Vatican Council decides to not actually decanonise him but significantly downgrade him by removing him from the church calendar: there are not enough facts to prove his non-existence. In December 2019 in Brussels I tell my Polish colleague: “Dorota, did you know that St. Christopher didn’t exist?” “It’s impossible”, she says. “He has helped me so much”.

This is where he appears as saint of the fake healing lineage: in healing, as in art, we do not ask whether something is true or false. Dualities become superfluous, what matters is what helps.

The Hotel of St. Christopher is a tribute to our desperate attempts to bless our own lives.

Look into the eyes of St. Christopher and maybe you will see someone you know

In the hotel of St. Christopher you no longer need a mirror to talk to yourself

Welcome to the Hotel of St. Christopher!

No longer can we meet the expense of being somewhere else.

No longer can we meet the expense of being someone else.

Foto Emīls Lacums