Memory Resort
The archive of Soviet-era resort medicine is real, precise and oddly lifeless — patients under heat lamps, mud baths, treatment rooms catalogued without feeling. But that is not how any of it survives in memory. Memory distorts: it inflates the syringe, darkens the doctor, makes the rooms stranger than they ever were.
How do you photograph a memory rather than a fact?
Was it real, or just a memory?
Seven works take the original Jūrmala balneology photographs and push them — distorted, disfigured, exaggerated, surreal and at the same time faded. Shown in a decaying sanatorium hall, framed and chained, propped in mud and lit by cold neon, they sit exactly between document and dream. The series doesn't restore the archive. It remembers it.
The Source
The starting point: original photographs from the Jūrmala balneology and treatment archive — sober records of a century of heat lamps, mud and machines. Faithful, exact, and waiting to be misremembered.
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Arch.06Memory Resort
The works in the room — exaggerated, framed and staged through the building itself: drowned in mud baths, washed in neon, hung along the cracked walls of the sanatorium that started it all.
Was it real? Or is it only a memory?