Press review

Anda Kļaviņa, Diena, 4 November 2004.
WHERE DO TRACTOR DRIVERS DISAPPEAR?

New media:
The project Milk realised by new media artists Ieva Auziņa and Esther Polack (the Netherlands) – a multimedia story about milk from Limbaži brought to the Netherlands and on its way to Utrecht market transformed into Rigamont cheese, similar to Parma cheese, – certainly is one of the most important events in visual art and culture of this year, involving Latvia’s participation. The project that includes artistic, ethnographic and geographic elements, shows both Latvian country landscape and the idea of the unified Europe, featuring a cross-section and quality unmatched by any art initiative on a similar subject, not in the least by research projects on the level of EU bureaucracy. Using GPS or locative media, the artists followed the courses of people involved in this milk route, documenting them also by sound recording and photographic means. Resulting multimedia installation Milk was on view at the Bārda Family Museum Rumbiņi, (Katvari Parish, Limbaži District) in early October. It was part of the international festival Art+Communication: Trans Cultural Mapping of Europe. [. . .]

Intuitive documentary:
[. . .] The project involved several Latvian farmers and Dutch customers. Three-part installation in Latvia was exposed in the family room at the poet Fricis Bārda’s family house – a spacious 19th century horizontal beam structure – among ancient furniture and crocheted tidies. Filigreed and laconic technologies organically coincide with this heavy space. [. . .]

[. . .] Movement of a point on a green plane was displayed on a LCD monitor. Some participant of the project moves either from pasture to home or from barn to toilet. His/her story on this route in heard and corresponding photographs taken by the artists are projected synchronically. [. . .]

The artists’ intervention in the everyday life of these people is so tactful that this reality seems uncontaminated and purely authentic when shown to other people as well: individuals’ stories are open and free, captured situations are natural. The subtle technique of sound recording and photographing has captured the events so serenely that they seem to materialise by a single touch. Not in vain several visitors have perceived the installation as a film. [. . .]

Back to control:
[. . .] Ability of the modern world to keep peculiar but harmonious relationships with nature, countryside and the difference is what moves in the installation Milk. The artists have succeeded in it because they combined both clear conception of the project, professional use of new technologies and intuitive yielding to environment and situations. [. . .]

Milk around Europe:
[. . .] The artists have plenty of ideas of where and how to use the project further. They would readily collaborate with the Ministry of Education to promote pupils’ and students’ activities in the creative use of GPS. [. . .]