RIGA AS A CONTEMPORARY LITERARY TEXT
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2018-3-155-169
The idea of Michel Butor, expressed in the essay “The City as a Text”, about the historical correlation of the architectonics of the city with the literary genre dominating in this period allowed the author of the article to read the contemporary Riga text from the genre perspective. The choice of two texts of the Riga group “Orbita” – the almanac “Orbita No. 3” (2001) and the multimedia project “Poetic Map of Riga” (2012–2014) – is motivated by the history of the creative group “Orbita” (Riga poets Sergey Timofeyev, Artūrs Punte, Semyon Khanin / Alexander Zapol, Vladimir Svetlov and Zhorzh Uallik are in its core), their special geo-poetics that turns the Riga locus into the genius loci, and, finally, by their myth-creation that allows to view their texts as the Riga Text. The special architectonics of the almanac “Orbita No. 3”, which is an editing table that assumes the existence of more than three thousand variants of combination of photographs and texts, offers the reader a fundamentally unfinished, unready, developing text. The authors of the almanac assign the same characteristics to a contemporary writer and a contemporary city – these are two correlating motifs in “Orbita No. 3”. Defining Riga only in comparison (to Moscow, St. Petersburg, New York, Shanghai, etc.), the authors of “Orbita” articulate the problem of self-identification. The inability to answer the question of “who am I” gives rise to the only possibility to read your city in the genre of a fragment that fits easily into another – Moscow, St. Petersburg, provincial – in any city text. An art-project “Poetic map of Riga” by “Orbita” was carried out from September 2012 to December 2014 and was timed to the election of Riga as the European Capital of Culture. The result of the creative efforts of the international team from Latvia (the curator of the project and the author of the concept is Artūrs Punte), Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Great Britain was the virtual map of Riga, which contained the city locuses, represented in poetry (both already created by the time of the project began, and created during its implementation). From the conceptual point of view, the created art object represents the city-Gesamtkunstwerk. The idea of the city as a total work of art has spread to all areas of project activity. It can be seen in the broadest coverage of the city topoi both in the project works and their presentations, as well as in the synthesis of the arts in a variety of genre forms – video and audio poetry, installations and performances, computer graphics and traditional painting, sculpture, music, dance, photography and graffiti. Moreover, in the synthesis of professional and non-professional art, the synthesis of emotionalaesthetic and rational-logical approaches, and in the collective multilingual author. Riga-Gesamtkunstwerk falls out of the present (including the social present): it is endowed with the characteristics of an ideal past and gets its realization only in an ideal, utopian future.
Keywords: city text, Riga text, myth, topos, locus, “Orbita”, genre, fragment, Gesamtkunstwerk, culture project, multimedia genres
References:
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Issue: 3, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 155 — 169
Downloads: 2099