OFLUXO

It was a day, or maybe a night, but definitely one like no other. The sea was restless, screechingly slashing its waves into concrete blocks piled up ashore, one huge stride following an even larger stride.

Was this the moment when a weary walrus came upon the shores of Latvia this summer? –– a sight like no other, the news blasted. It can get no shrimp here, poor thing, the artist says in one of our conversations.
Was the Baltic sea as such when a brown bear was floating on a block of ice – I kid you not – towards an Island of Seals (the tuskless kin of walrus). An island stone’s throw from Latvia albeit bearing the name given by Estonia? No one really saw the bear with their own eyes, but the trail remains.

Anna’s work is cross-stitched with curious stories, pulsating materialities, and continental drifts. The stitches flesh out a web of unbelievable origins that have their way of tickling your ear, your nose, your throat. As I squint inside the neck of a glass aroma vessel, it starts resembling the inside of a nose. If you would stick yours in, I promise, a peculiar intimate memory of a Latvian seaside town will be instilled in your membrane: a local fish factory on a Tuesday, spices in storage units waiting to be handed out to traveling sailors, creaky damp wood boards of a ship.

What anecdotes do the floating vessels ship to us by sea? How does a borrowed memory smell? Travelers through centuries and geographies would be able chime in on this one, having widely planted their feet in Nature and the lives around it; leaving eponymous scribblings in their botanical notes, and flattened herbal skeletons now resting under glass casings in memory institutions. One such traveler, Aleksandrs Šulcs once replenished similar enclosures in the Latvian Museum of Natural History with species born far, far away – in South America, to be exact, – found stumbling around a wool factory in Latvia. We’re not sure if it will be possible to refute such an impossible story of origin.

Naming plants is a whole science in itself – one not taken lightly – a task encapsulating the rhymes and rhythms of those breathing around, the lores and the tragedies and joy of certain ecologies. The year was 1700, when Joseph Pitton de Tournefort must have had a similar thought while world-scouting, crafting originary fables of the plant kingdom – titling the untitled, dividing the unstructured.

But, well, everything can be anything, Anna said – date palms can grow in Alaska, and Black spruce can be found in deserts of Africa – for a century, or for a little while.