Wednesday 30 April
16:30 - 18:00 GMT / 17.30 - 19:00 CET (online)

This talk is a work in progress for a presentation that I will present later in May in Madrid at a conference – “Writing with Ruins: Embodied Encounter & Creative Narratives.”

The talk is about the place where I spent the happiest 10 summers of my life – my grandparents’ summerhouse in a remote corner of western Latvia. Leaving it behind with my parents’ emigration to the United States and then my grandparents’ emigration to Germany was one of the most traumatic experiences of my childhood. I cherished the memories, the skills, and the few possessions I had from that place, but I never knew what happened to it. I returned there after 22 years to find it abandoned – my grandfather’s books still lay on the floor, my great-aunt’s coat hung on the coat rack, a plastic Lego bag – my Lego bag – lay by the rodent-eaten bed where I fondly remember waking up to the smell of the morning dew and the sound of my grandfather chopping wood in the woodshed. Realizing that the place offered an unparalleled opportunity for auto-archaeology as well as much-needed healing, I undertook two surveys there in 2023 and 2024.

The study drew on new materialist approaches, family archaeology, surface survey, and my own phenomenological reactions to the place – especially the altered smells and sounds that called out for my attention. I photographed and GPS recorded the summerhouse, overlaid old family photos with its new material realities, spent a night in the tent in the yard, and interviewed the only other surviving family member who once lived there – my grandmother, now 85 years old and practically housebound.

I offer these findings through a personal essay combined with the juxtaposition of photos, experiences, and emotive responses that straddle the past and the present. Beyond representational, romantic, and intellectual values of ruins there are the embodied, contradictory, and deeply affective aspects of personal vestiges that confront us with the need to reconcile our own treasured pasts with the passage of time.

Anatolijs Venovcevs is a Russian-speaking Latvian and is currently employed as the world’s northernmost research archaeologist at the Svalbard Museum in Longyearbyen, Norway. Previously, he held a postdoctoral research position at the University of Oulu where he looked at the unique mushroom ecologies that grow within modern ruins – his love for mushrooms stemming from the summers he spent in the forests with his grandmother at their summerhouse in Latvia. He received his PhD from UiT: The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø in a project that compared the ongoing legacies of single industrial mining towns in Canada, Norway, and Russia.

This event is hosted on zoom - Please register HERE