Creative aspects of emptiness in the public spaces in Riga

The slow deterioration of the Freedom Monument (1935) and the fragmentation of V. I. Lenin’s monument (1950-1991)

Zlata Mechetina

Riga's public spaces became landscapes of political turmoil and contesting power in the 20th century. However, the cartographic tradition of the monuments' documentation diminishes their uneasy role in the city's texture. This essay explores how political history is reflected in Riga's architectural landscape through the lens of material history based on the examples of the slowly deteriorating Freedom monument (1935) and destroyed Lenin's monument (1950-1991). Therefore, the essay investigates how material processes establish rites of passages in the existing or destroyed monuments' empty sites. They oscillate political history and identity issues in the material forms and activate the community around it to react to changes in political discourses.

In this essay, I aim to investigate emptiness in the public spaces in Riga, Latvia, exploring the ways in which political history and identity issues are reflected in the architectural landscape in the forms of monuments and the spaces around them. We often see monuments as dots on the map; however, they take up more space, physically in people’s everyday lives and historically not as events but rather tales embedded into the collective memory. That is precisely why we need to intertwine anthropology and architecture as we might realise that cartographic representation is somewhat reductionist. It leaves behind the sense of the material transformation of the monuments and melancholia that often follows them, which is a dialectic material process revealed in time (Gell 1998:10). 

My argument will be based on a material comparison between V. I. Lenin’s monument (1950-1991) and the Freedom Monument, (1935) designed by Kārlis Zāle. The material analysis is based on the perspective inspired by Louis Althusser’s critical view on historical materialism and the ways ideology embeds itself into civil society in I​deology and Ideological State Apparatuses (​1970). I will focus on the materiality of traces of destruction and slow deterioration as ‘material existence’ of ideology. In Soviet Riga two ideologically opposed sculptures created the city’s topography by standing on the same street.They are mute but their relocations and different forms of deterioration speak for the history of the political change in the country. It presents language, architectural and changes in political discourse. Lenin’s sculpture was removed in 1991, but the empty site of the monument has uneasy connotations in the public and media sphere even now, which is evident in discussions on Facebook, Livejournal and Tripadvisor. Therefore, I aim to investigate the ways in which the silent war between the monuments operates in the context of recent political debates, such as whether the Russian language should be abolished in Latvia.

First of all, it is essential to determine what is a monument. Alois Riegl defines in ​The Modern Cult of the Monument: Its Character and Its Origin​ (1982) that the monument is an artefact that circulates elements of the past in itself, intentionally or unintentionally. This definition effectively encompasses any object presenting a result of the process of the creative human activity. He divided monuments into the three types: intentional monuments, unintentional monuments (historical monuments) and age-value monuments. In this essay, I will expand on Riegl’s definitions of intentional and age-value monuments (Riegl 1982: 26). Furthermore, Riegl raises issues of the historical and artistic monuments. He highlights the fact that the artistic aspect is about the finitude of the creative process and aligns with the gradual development or change of society. Therefore, a monument can also be a documentation of a particular moment in history (Gombrich 1999). He uses the term 'evidence' which can be expanded by the idea that abstract power of ideology is solidified through the monuments. They aim to keep the ideas alive and eternalised by means of fine art. However, ideologies break down, but, in most cases, monuments rest as documentation of the previous discourses and systems of knowledge (Foucault 2002). Therefore, the mortality of culture, or deterioration of monuments which represent it, is of value to the culture itself. 

The Freedom Monument: mythscape of the community building

To begin with, the Freedom Monument is a granite and copper memorial in Riga, Latvia, built to honour soldiers killed during the Latvian War of Independence. (fig. 1) Its erection started with conflict as the Latvians searched for a symbol to validify their sovereignty, and the mayor of Riga banned the public display of the restored bronze statue of Peter the Great. It provoked heated discussions between the Latvian and Russian locals, regarding which monument had more rights to stand there (Kruk 2009: 706). The monument as a concept of a place for public congregation for remembrance emerged in the early 1920s when the Latvian Prime Minister, Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics, decided to run a contest of designs for a "memorial column". (fig. 2) It was built in the 1930s according to the scheme "Mirdzi kā zvaigzne!" ("Shine like a star!") submitted by Kārlis Zāle and was financed by donations from the public.

The 42.7 meter obelisk monument is made up of 56 sculptures on four levels, divided into 13 sculptural groups that depict Latvian history and myths. At the base of the memorial, there is an inscription, 'Tēvzemei un Brīvībai' (For Fatherland and Freedom), accompanied by granite friezes depicting Latvians singing and fighting for their freedom. The core of the monument is created by several tetragonal shapes built on one another. They decrease in size towards the top and completed by a 19-meter travertine column. It is topped by a nine-meter, female statue holding three stars above her head. Together, they symbolise the three historical provinces of Latvia: the three stars represent the three regions of the country: Kurzeme, Vidzeme, and Latgale. (fig. 3) 

In ​Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998), Gell argues that visual art can be a form of instrumental action – the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others through a logical mechanism of abduction: those who observe the works of art come under the influence of those who produced them. Concerning public sculpture, it is a turn from the aesthetic statement to the political one, triggering action around it. The Freedom Monument is a focal point of the city, public gatherings and protests, such as the anti-Soviet sabotages in June 1987, when a small group of dissidents hold silent manifestations to protest against human rights violations in the USSR (Kruk 2009: 706). This relates to Alfred Gell’s theory of visual art as a form of instrumental action.The logical mechanism of aesthetical abduction for Gell is a transcultural one; it is the potential of art objects to embody complex intentionalities, concentrating it in the empty space around the monument. The Freedom Monument turns into the liminal area for the rites of passages from one discourse to another, for example, from a place of governmental action and celebration of the Soviet calendar festivities into a space for dissident action. Therefore, the artwork mediates social agency. 

Nowadays, the Freedom Monument activates a sense of national identity as well; it is also a place for official ceremonies in Riga. For example, locals are always placing flowers at the base of the monument, which was an act of sabotage in Soviet times. Furthermore, the honour guard changes every hour on the hour from 09:00 - 18:00. (fig. 4) There is an internal movement in the square orchestrated around the monument, both personal and of the Latvian governmental apparatus reflected in the honour guards’ ceremonies. In this way, the empty space around the sculpture becomes a 'mythscape,' the extended discursive realm in time and space in which the forming myths of the nation, in this case of sovereignty and liberty, are constantly being reconstructed (Bell 2003). 

What is more, community building is happening on the base of myths about the materials from which the sculptures are created. The quasi-magical capacity of materials has the potential to conjure up associations and attach vocabularies and attention to its aesthetic qualities. It includes the way the materials travelled from forests alluding back to the local myths and fairy tales, which are in the center of the community. Stones are believed to have special qualities originating from the folklore; it is a coded knowledge that can be shared from generation to generation and create new bonds between people. It activates the imagination and social action of one of the Latvian modes of self-awareness, romantic-ethnocentric (Buceniece 1997: 66). 

Presentation of the history through the lenses of decomposition and deterioration is about finding balance within the discourses of 'decolonisation' from the Soviet hegemony (Gramsci 1971), heritage of socialism or succumbing to the logic of cosmopolitanism and dynamic multicultural capitalism of the European Union.There are two routes in framing Lenin's monument and the Freedom Monument; there is an aestheticisation of fragments or ruins originating from the Renaissance, and there is a more contemporary fascination with the dynamic decomposition of the matter.

According to Walter Benjamin's aesthetic approach to the contemporary times as a fragment (Butler 2016: 274), interpretation of the monument as a body of history with a status of unmediated scientific evidence of the event is rather diminishing. Focus on the process of deterioration opens up alternative interpretation of works through temporality rather than seeing them as concrete and out-of time manifestations of the historical events.

In this way, there is a creative tracking and documentation of the local narratives, such as destruction, around and of the monument replaces  the monumentalisation of the politically imposed meta-narratives. Focus on the process of deterioration gives a possible interpretation of works through temporality rather than seeing them as concrete and out-of time manifestations of the historical events. 

For example, the Freedom Monument is affected by climate change, which is a result of developing industrialisation and the development of Riga as a port. Frost and rain have deteriorated the texture of the reinforced concrete, as well as caused rusting of its steel reinforcements. Also, worsening air pollution has affected the state of the monument. Even though the area around the memorial was pedestrianised in 1990, street pollution has led to high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, which have corroded the monument's surface. The supporting structures of the monument have also been damaged by constant vibrations caused by the nearby traffic. (fig. 5) 

Furthermore, the travertine has started to crack, and its pores have been filled with particles of sand, causing it to change colour and blacken and providing a habitat for small organisms, like moss and lichens. The cult of age value praised by Riegl plays against the monument as its surface starts to deteriorate. Such weathering of the monument is a result of the irregular maintenance procedures. During the restoration process in 2001 some of the fastenings with polyurethane filler were replaced and applied water repellent to the monument to prevent further decay. It was determined then that maintenance should be carried out every two years (Sibrada 2003). ​Such gradual processes of slow daily deterioration expose the obscure relationship between humans and non-humans; it is a transformation of the familiar material world. As the form and texture of objects change, the initial functions and meanings transform as well, blurring the boundaries between things and humans (Ingold 2013: 22). 

In contrast to the dynamism of the Freedom Monument in animating national sovereignty and deteriorating at the same time, the more passive principle of the aestheticised ruin or fragment is evident in the leftovers from Lenin's sculpture, which are scattered across the city and documented in Minna Henriksson's photographs from her 2013 project ‘Lenin of Riga’, which consisted of a temporal installation of photographs, video and photocopies. Overall, Lenin's monument exemplifies the idea that changing discourses encourage the cult of different values; the removal of a sculpture is the most visible example of a challenge to previous power structures. 

From 1890-1910, Baltic Germans and Russians reclaimed their historical rights to Riga by erecting sculptures of their respective heroes. After World War II, the Soviets demolished most of the monuments on the theme of Latvian sovereignty, and destroyed the remaining monuments of Baltic Germans, replacing them with Socialist realist pieces. Newly erected statues of Lenin and Stalin confirmed the arrival of the new regime (Kruk 2009: 705). This history of destruction opens up a tendency of formulating and presenting political statements to the public in the forms of art objects. 

Lenin’s statue: melancholic object of the regime

Lenin's statue was located on the Brivibas Bulvaris in the center of Riga from 1950 to 1991.The grandiose design by Sergei Merkurov was influenced by ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, communist sculpture had been associated with the colossal ‘Assyro-Babylonian’ style, marking Soviet imperial power (Kruk 2009: 253). There were 84 outdoor sculptures and busts of Vladimir Lenin in Latvia by the 1990s aiming to eliminate national barriers through a shared visual language (​Urdze 1988: 185).​ This image has been associated with the ideological indoctrination and Russification imposed by the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1991. (fig. 6) 

However, the Soviet monuments are not as permanent as the imposed ideological order; the cast-iron and bronze plaques and letters have been picked off by collectors of non-ferrous metals in the 1990s as the Soviet signs became ideologically undesirable, alongside the iconic images of the toppling of the monument on the 25th of August 1991 as a symbolic moment of victory of democracy and freedom spread across the world (fig. 7). In the ​Critique of Violence ​(1998), Walter Benjamin formulates that the violence is constitutive of both legal and political systems. In this reading, the violation is the primary condition for the production of emerging forms of politics and social life (Navaro-Yashin 2008; 7). However, the spot in front of the central government building still retains its meaning as a place of questioning the prospective route of Latvia. Dedicated communists regularly celebrate Lenin's birthday and the anniversary of his death, as well as the Revolution day, by laying flowers on the empty walkway (Kruk 2009; 715). Emptiness still has social significance; those acts reveal how the urban space constructs communal urban identity. Absence becomes a dynamic term opening up discussions on the national identity and unsolved troubles of the collective memory.

Melancholia is one of the essential parts of the collective post-socialist unconscious because of the war, constant repressions, and censorship leading to the traumatised notion of empathy (Lázár and Luse 2007), (Cervinkova 2012: 160). Judith Butler developed the studies of melancholy as a 'specifically psychic economy,' embedded in gendered forms of subjectivation and power. It is possible to expand on her theory by referencing the situations of 'ethnic conflict'; it takes place when the person who has been lost is one who belongs to the community of the so-defined 'enemy,' the loss is not symbolised as one but as a change of the social status (Navaro-Yashin 2008: 15). Therefore it is not adequately grieved over, in the Latvian case, because of the absurd russification of the country to the extent that the local language became extinct. Sovereignty and the remaking of distinct political communities (as well as the identification of 'internal enemies' or 'traitors') do not allow the ritualised mourning of persons lost in between political regimes. In this way, Lenin's statue could serve as the melancholic object of Soviet nation-building, and its destruction served as a consummation of trauma. 

In contrast, Lenin's sculpture is cast from bronze and placed on a granite pedestal. It marks technological development as well as a material presented to the public emphasising the importance of war production, factories, and oppressive conditions of labour straight into the face of the citizens in the form of materials whose properties promised the creation of new worlds. In this way, those materials and techniques are converted into political power and economic capital (Drazin and Küchler 2015). (fig. 8) The manufacturing of political propaganda art as well as local art and craft on an industrial scale was mainly based on the art production facilities at Māksla ("Art"); part of its enormous income was awarded in forms of grants to the members creating original artworks. 

However, the market was more important than the ideological objectives set by the party: private individuals and state institutions were indifferent to academic art, and they preferred low-cost and mass-produced artistic goods, while there were also commissions for decorating apartments, institutions, and gardens (Kruk 2009: 251). This resonance in forms of labour and loyalty rooted in industry echoes the logic of the colonial world, as it is a vertical form of communication coming from the governmental apparatus. 

Furthermore, following ideas in I​nventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment ​(1994) by Larry Wolff, which sees the artificial division between 'Western Europe' and 'Eastern Europe' derive from a post-orientalist distinction between 'Northern' and 'Southern’, this work of cultural construction and intellectual deception created by the philosophes of the Enlightenment leads to the idea of Eastern Europe being constructed as a concept by the exterior gaze of the academia. Therefore, even a discussion of the monuments and their materiality acquires a political dimension. It raises the need for changing the perspective from the academic jargon towards the changing textures of everyday urban life. In a way, it aligns with the postcolonial term of subalterns discussed by Gyatari Spivak in the essay ​Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea ​(2010). In postcolonial studies, subaltern is a group under cultural hegemony excluded from the socio-economic institutions of society devaluing their ​political voices. It is achieved by replacing myths and local forms of knowledge by Eurocentric ways of knowing, such as writing and reasoning. Spivak argues that subaltern people are not able to articulate their native ways of knowing; instead, they must epistemologically change their native expression of knowledge to the Western system of knowledge. This idea can be translated into the systemic cultural hegemony established by the Soviets over Riga and Latvia, which included the cult of Lenin and Stalin, communist iconography, symbols, and narratives, which should have been approved with the party based at Moscow, a kind of communist metropole. 

Destruction as a subaltern voice and creation of new Latvia's Russian-speaking discourse emerges from the historical context of over twenty years of post-Soviet independence and approximately fifty years of Soviet rule. Carrying in mind the idea of subalterns and their voices that might not be recognisable and properly documented, we can turn to the empty sites of destroyed monuments as places of dynamic rebuilding and reshaping of the community. 

Empty spaces and ghost-like presences

How does the empty space constitute the environment around it? (fig. 9) Within the emerging discipline of memory studies, empty spaces are treated as political, social, and cultural practices that are grounded in the past, but are tightly intertwined with contemporary concerns. (fig. 10) For example, Lenin's sculpture is remembered through inscriptions, graffiti, and online discussions, giving this memorial a ghost-like presence in the everyday of Riga. (fig. 11) According to James Wertsch (2008: 150), collective memory is in opposition to formal history; the former has a single committed perspective which reflects a particular group's social framework and an interpretation of events that denies the 'pastness' of events. In this way, we can interpret graffiti as a declaration of ownership over the past, through a material interaction with an absent monument an act of translation of social memory into an individual one. 

Memories can, therefore, be conceptualised as discursively created understandings that are embedded in the past, but which affect contemporary times as they can be re-actualised by the physical interaction with the material. (fig. 12) They operate as essential sources of personal and group identification and solidified through commemoration and reflection on the act of destruction of the order of cleanliness by small activities, like throwing rubbish around, and mark-making in the space of absence. Navaro Yashin argues that there is a possibility for the spatially affected melancholy in form of ruination as the turf for a new political system. The notion of 'ruination' frames the material remains or artifacts of violation, as well as the subjectivities and continuous affects that echo in the aftermath of the silent war of monuments (Navaro-Yashin 2008; 5). 

For Mary Douglas in ​Purity and Danger ​(2002), society is formed against the notion of filth, or by excluding that which is 'dirty.' It establishes boundaries of the social practice, which marks the social system. A certain symbolic 'purity' is necessary for the making of social protocol, which is evident if we compare the Freedom Monument and leftovers from Lenin's sculpture; it is one form of society symbolically overtaking the other. Filth, such as garbage, graffiti, and lack of care over the monument, marks the outer contours of social order and a lack of social organisation around this past symbol of power (Douglas 2002). 

This outlook goes in line with the critique of the subject-oriented methodologies proposed by Foucault and further developed by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Using ANT, Latour proposes that materiality, ‘non-human entities', may be interpreted as effecting 'agency' (Latour 1993). He imagines things and humans being entangled with one another, in the form of a flat or horizontal 'network' of assemblages. This 'flattening' as a methodology generates the movement in social sciences from the emphasis on language towards the dynamic processes of change (Navaro-Yashin 2008; 10). 

Even though Mary Douglas (1966: 160) characterised waste as an essential product of the creation of order, she also commented on the threat posed by things that have been incompletely absorbed into the category of waste, such as Lenin's pedestal or fragments of the bronze body (DeSilvey 2006). 'Rejected bits and pieces' which are recognisably 'out of place,' she observes, 'still have some identity because they can be traced back to their origins' (1966: 160). In this case, emptiness itself becomes a waste as it struggles to overcome the previous ideology identified by ghost-like symbols (Edensor 2005: 314); empty site of does not need to commemorate anything anymore, but it interrupts the texture.

Conclusion

In conclusion, putting architecture and anthropology into conversation raises issues such as spatial organisation, forms of human dwellings, and the interchange between social life and physical surroundings. It is emptiness of the public spaces that constitutes the materiality of ideology, while earlier anthropologists (structuralists like Mauss or Lévi-Strauss) have been observing architecture as a representation of social structures. Instead,the post-structuralist approach focuses on the performative nature of architectural forms, on what it does to us. In the case of Lenin's sculpture, its fall and documentation of this destruction serve as a rite of passage in the social consciousness. In contrast, the Freedom Monument is used as a tool in changing discourses, at first marking the victims of WWI and then becoming a marker of Latvian sovereignty and acceptance of Western understanding of universal democratic values. 

An explicitly ethnographic approach, which is a crucial feature of anthropology, should prioritise dynamic processes of visualization and translation as forms of architectural–ethnographic representation (Navaro-Yashin 2018:17). In this way, the turn to the investigation of melancholia of the impossibility of escape from ideology constituted through the empty spaces refers to subjectivity and the world of objects. It becomes an arena for stories, leftovers, fragments, and garbage that shares human solidarity beyond discursive shifts and wars, a recreation of the community identity through the tales and creative investigation of the collective memory through graffiti in the area of Brivibas Bulvaris.   

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