Brownie from Bruņinieku Street by Inga Meldere

Inga Meldere “Brownie from Bruninieku Street. Photo by Andrejs Strokins.

Brownie is a term coined by Rigans for uninhabited wooden houses in historical neighbourhoods where only the façades are kept up. In order to comply with the real estate management standards, such buildings have to be regularly repainted, which is the simplest way for the owner to avoid penalties for an inscription or a drawing left on the walls by some passer-by. A brown floor paint, as the cheapest and best-loved option, makes these abandoned buildings even more strikingly sad. Both in the city centre and the historic neighbourhoods, the brownies bring to the forefront the issue of the unused potential of the memories encapsulated by urban cultural space.

The artist Inga Meldere (b. in 1979 in Kuldīga) is currently based in Helsinki. She has studied at the University of Latvia and the Art Academy of Latvia, supplementing her education at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Her art is characterised by detailed work with source materials and the ability to combine in whole fragments of personal experiences and collective memory, quotes from art history and imagery loaned to everyday life. Among her most recent exhibitions are her one-woman shows “Vertex” at SIC gallery in Helsinki (2017) and “Colouring Books” at the kim? Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga (2016), the episode in the series of exhibitions “Twofold”, realized together with Atis Ieviņš at the National Art Museum of Latvia (2017), as well as participation in the group exhibition “There and Back Again: Contemporary Art from the Baltic Sea Region” at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (2018-2019).

The inter-season programme of RIBOCA, microRIBOCA has been developed to foster a feeling of belonging to a particular place among Rigans and to free their creative potential that is present in everyday life in the public space of the city. It will offer interdisciplinary public art projects and urban exploration walks providing Rigans with instruments of social involvement useful for urban revitalization.

Inga Meldere “Brownie from Bruninieku Street. Photo by Andrejs Strokins.