Threading with red
2024
There is a small boat cemetery located in the forest by the Baltic Sea, in Mazirbe, Latvia/Livonia. I decided to create a site-specific work there while performing it for the camera. For this, I used 500 meters of red thread to weave a missing part of one of the boats.
While working on 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 symbolized life and survival; about the refugees who today continue to cross seas to escape 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 the line of red thread, and how, together, these stories become visible; about the impossibility of recreating what was destroyed, but the importance of remembering