Mme Molberg Shower

In 2003, Rīgas Līcis – a health resort built in Jūrmala
in 1970 – was bouncing from one owner to another. Renovation works were supposedly underway, and while the facility still retained its original appearance
of a sanatorium for elite party members, director Janis Kalejs enlisted photographer Vladimir Svetlov, costume designer Kristine Jurjane and actors Baiba Broka, Guna Zariņa Kaspars Znotiņš, and Ģirts Krūmiņš to stage scenes of the Soviet elite in its interiors.

These staged shots show the lush life of the political elite of the 1970s – an era known as the ‘heyday of stagnation’. Few Soviet citizens had access to such facilities; it was only the party leaders of the Soviet Union and their colleagues from the socialist allied countries who could use the most advanced technologies of the time to restore their health. The combination of yearning for freedom, ideological correctness and total stagnation create the particular feeling of disintegration specific to this contradictory era.

Vladimir Svetlov made this photo series resemble stills of an unknown movie—viewers are invited to think up a story for themselves. A group of young people is left to enjoy all kinds of leisure activities,
from bathing to potentially dangerous experiments with a pressure chamber. We do not know whether they are members of the elite, or kitchen workers who have ventured to taste all these otherwise inaccessible delights during the off-season.

The characters are ultimately incapable of self-identification: they only succeed in fragmentary reconstruction of Soviet movie scenes of an ideal vacation, or of the guilty pleasures of the ‘wild West’. Time and again, their attempts to create a credible story fail miserably, the facts do not match the representation, their actions look fake and ridiculous; the professional actors are unable to cope with the simple role of vacationers.

The deliberate absurdity of the series narrows the boundaries of the real. Instead of being a restoration of the past, these photos illustrate only its stereotypes, their grotesque and excessive frivolity revealing the voids in our collective memory.

In 2017, the book Rīgas līcis was published in the Public Space series.