Returnings

Returnings is an ongoing body of work made during repeated journeys back to Latvia, the country of my birth. Combining photographs with fragments of writing, the project traces the emotional and symbolic weight of returning to a landscape marked by personal memory and Soviet inheritance.

Growing up in the afterglow of occupation means that belonging is never straightforward: it is carried in the body as something partial, fractured, and constantly renegotiated. Returnings looks at how the residues of Soviet rule, the architectural ghosts, the rural quiet, the generational silences, intersect with familial rituals and intimate geography.

Through subdued landscapes and close observation, the work asks what it means to feel both rooted and estranged, to inhabit a place where history is not abstract but lived in the soil, the houses, the gestures of the people who remained. Returnings is a study of how culture accumulates in the psyche, how migration reshapes identity, and how the past persists long after the empire that produced it has gone.