 Good afternoon, I'm a visual artist and I'm also a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds and today with Inga Lasse Curator we will speak about diaspora and yeah diaspora is an interesting phenomenon the word diaspora comes from the Greek word diaspero which means to disperse or to scatter across and basically it means a community of people who were who has dispersed or were displaced from their place of origin of most often because of traumatic event and to be considered diaspora there shouldn't be just a just a mere physical dispersion as to be considered diaspora people have to have or maintain a specific form of memory of their place of origin the place that becomes a point of their cultural identity and in my research I look at the questions of memory and trauma in post-soviet societies in particular I look at how traces of historical trauma persist in time and how we might inherit the past that we did not live through this is why among other things I became interested in diaspora and I'm interested to research how memory and cultural identity persists throughout generations and with people's relocations or in other words in space and time and it's important to remember that it's not just people who move around dispersions also means dispersions of cultural values languages personal memories and personal traumas and this is my work called a brick to the world that I made a couple of years ago for an artist residency in Kazakhstan and this is installation I work with three alphabets of of the Kazakh language and I use the alphabets to address the issue of cultural identity in the 20th century under the soviet rule Kazakh alphabets was changed twice first the traditional arabic alphabets was replaced by the latin alphabet and then in the late 30s it was replaced by syrillic and at the moment we use syrillic letters and what is interesting it might sound abstract but what's interesting it was also the way the time or the wave of migration from Kazakhstan people were trying to escape to escape starvation and political oppression and later these people formed a Kazakh diaspora abroad and what I find fascinating that Kazakh diaspora in different countries use different alphabets for example people in China, Afghanistan and Iran use arabic letters and people in Turkey Germany England or USA use latin letters so they cannot kind of communicate with each other in written language although they speak we speak the same language and in this work I use three three alphabets which I put on the cubes that appropriate the design of educational cubes for children and on each side of the cube there is a letter the same letter but in three in a different alphabet by walking past this installation the viewer changes the angle and each time they they read it in a different alphabet but they never get the full view it's always a fragmented view so with this fragmented view you cannot really grasp the entire phrase and I would like to refer to the fragmentation of collective memory with many gaps and silences so yeah in this with this installation I would like to raise a question how everyone is a brick to the vault and it's it's on on the other hand it's a solid brick of identity but on the other hand it is kind of a brick that can be moved and make new new towers of meaning thank you thank you so yes so can we have the other image yes so I will continue to speak about diaspora a little bit through the lens of the project called portable landscapes that I did with my colleagues and that is still ongoing actually and you can see an image here from the project when it was exhibited in Riga at the Latvian National Art Museum and so in a way the idea of the project was to work with Latvian artists in exile mostly the post-second world war ones and contemporary artists and so we did this research because like really after the second world war there was massive waves of Latvian people that ended up in many different places in the world and so since there was a Soviet Union there was no place to kind of come back so this diaspora and exile scene they really kind of existed parallely right and and we were thinking like how do we kind of reintroduce it to the local scene in Latvia but also how do we speak about that in New York in Berlin in Paris like in the places where they actually lived and what does that mean and so the project started and one thing that I would like to raise with this presentation is sort of the curatorial and institutional responsibility that we have especially we felt that we have it in relation to European refugee crisis so there was this moment of crisis and it went on and we thought so what can we do as an institution and for us it seemed that we need to talk about the exile or or migration of the past because in Latvia the attitudes were very like sort of racist and and when the European Union division happened in 2015 that oh we need to take like 700 refugees just like 700 from all these like that are flowing you know and and it created like an incredible kind of wave of racism and political crisis so we were like how do we speak about that with the Latvian audience and and that's why for us that was this one reason why it was very important to speak about diaspora and say like well listen but you know like not that far ago so many people were sort of accepted in many different places like Latvian people so we should also think about migration today that later it will create like a shared history uh uh yeah so and and that shared present should be maybe more different than uh you know like surrounded by hostility so yeah and and the picture basically shows this one Latvian artist who lived in us and her name is Diana Dagonia and it's interesting that in her work she worked she made these three paintings like the ones with refugees and the one with this woman in the 70s while living in America and you could kind of see these two things you know like one is really uh she reflect on the refugee the Vietnam refugees because she's like a perceptive you know like she sees what's happening in the world and and in us at the time and the other one is her family sort of arriving in us so she already did that in the 70s this kind of reflective work and that uh woman it's more like about the role of of women in America you know in in relation to consumer culture and all these things so that's one of those let's say historical works and so if I still have time I would like to just read the quote that was very inspiring for the for the project and so basically and it's from the catalog that we did so basically migration resulting from climate change in is particularly topical nowadays and and it there will be more and more of that yeah if not from wars then you know from the climate change because many territories will be completely underwater and or become uninhabitable because of the higher temperatures so raising numbers of unregistered people may also pose a serious threat to democracy and currently existing structures of political representation and so the philosopher Thomas Nail offers an interesting way of looking at the situation uh he suggests reviewing both history and the current political situation from the point of view of movement migration and the migrant instead of that of a static citizen so Nail calls his theory kinopolitics and it's a reference to social kinetics or movement and so rather than taking the preconceived notion of the citizen as his point of departure he proposes beginning with migration flows looking at the ways in which migrants travel to become citizens and to form countries and paying attention to how they often present an opposing force and an alternative to existing state structures from a political point of view a migration theory that takes movement as its prime consideration might be more inclusive than the one which prioritizes the citizenship and uh yeah so in a way while it seems like a riddle or or like a weird utopia that we could look at the world like this I think it's uh yeah it's a great way to finish the presentation thank you