Threading with red
2024
There is a small boat cemetery located in the forest at the Baltic seaside, in Mazirbe, Latvia/Livonia. I decided spontaneously to respond to it with a performance/an art intervention that I have video recorded. I used 500m of red thread to weave a missing part of the boat.
While I was making it, I kept thinking about the traumatic histories of the western coasts of Latvia and Estonia, where many people fled to Sweden from the Soviets using boats in 1943-1944; about the Soviets who destroyed the boats of fishermen, for whom the boat meant life and survival; about the refugees who nowadays keep crossing the seas to flee from wars, brutal regimes, and poverty, and how little the world cares about them; about the importance of an individual journey, a story that was taking shape in a line of red thread and how together they become visible; about the impossibility of recreating what was destroyed but the importance of remembering.