The Survival Kit Book

How do the rituals and serendipities of togetherness, torn apart by the pandemic, the locked borders and broken keys, change the realm that we used to know as festivals, feasts, microbiome, exchange and merging of impressions? Every year since 2010, the annual international festival “Survival Kit” has been attempting to capture the essential survival strategies relevant for the specific moment in time. What do you do when the moment has stretched out like a string of chewing gum stuck to your fingers and you find yourself at a loss to tell whether it is April or September, ’21 or ’22, or just a pandemic where time is measured in waves? These were the questions we had in mind, alongside the subjects raised by the curators Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu and Joanna Warsza, as we worked on this year’s publication.
The “Survival Kit” book is a guide to the exhibition and, at the same time, an issue you take with you in this fragile world where you may have managed to see just a fragment of the festival before everything is closed down and everybody is asked to stay home. Then you have a book where enough space has been left for images and contemplation of the stretched-out time.

ClientThe Latvian Centre for Contemporary ArtEditorZane ZajančkauskaDesignersIlze Kalnbērziņa-Prā, Tatjana RaičiņecaFotoAleksejs BeļeckisYear2021