Arguably, silence is a form of life stripped to a bare minimum, our lungs take a breath and pause before exhaling again. Carried inside a biological mechanism by which we inhabit the world, silence is a hidden space shared with all living and non-living organisms.
It is something so intimate and familiar yet it can be altered and intensified as a choice, a tool and a weapon in between a right for self-protection and an engine of oppression. It might be the case that in our new collective reality silence is partially democratized as we adjust to the ruptures in the social realm, reconfiguring the most contemporary layers of our society such as nightclubbing and flying into radically political acts.
Particularly resonant within this renewed context, silence reminds us of the need to descale and economize, and in the case of second Riga biennale RIBOCA2 a potential to turn fragility into a constructive force. The young Riga biennale is part of a new wave of regional platforms aimed at creating more sustainable models in a cultural environment saturated with easily recycled schemes.
Here within the dystopian surrounding of an abandoned backyard which also opens up as a prelude to the main venue , the exhibition affords ample space for the artworks to expose the nuances and multiplicities of a dialogue with historical, the socio-political and the geographical.
Traversing wild plants, flowers frothing yellow and red, derelict dwellings and muggy soil, a tension between abandon and intimacy, control and expansion unfolds. The artist intervenes in the existing structures domesticating them with hybrid sculptures featuring Dionysian faces made of baked salt bread and adorned with metal elements, suspended somewhere between organic fragility and cyborg artifice.
