On 30 January at 7:00 PM, we invite you to a special evening of performances featuring five international artists from Chile, South Africa, France, Italy, and Finland. As part of their Nordic tour, three expanded-cinema artists—Étienne Caire (FR), Andrea Saggiomo (IT), and Marek Pluciennik (FI)—will present their work and also lead a creative workshop at Baltic Analog Lab. In addition, musicians Natalia Rivera Riffo (CL) and Rheece van der Linde (SA), artists-in-residence of the joint Baltic Analog Lab and Skaņu Mežs festival residency programme, will perform sound works created during their residency in collaboration with Erica Synths.

The event will feature three expanded-cinema performances in which 16mm and 35mm film projectors serve not only as tools for image projection, but also as live, improvised instruments of sound and light, dissolving the boundaries between experimental cinema and live performance.

The programme is presented by traveling guest artists and filmmakers Étienne Caire, also known as RioJim (France), Andrea Saggiomo (Italy), and Marek Pluciennik (Finland). The audience will experience RioJim’s chemically generated visual landscapes using 16mm projector, Pluciennik’s hand-operated 35mm projections, and Saggiomo’s audiovisual concert, in which sound is generated by self-built, light-sensitive circuits.

The artists are visiting Riga to lead a workshop at the end of the month on 16mm film printing techniques - DIY contact printing in the darkroom (for beginners) and film printing with an optical printer (for those with prior knowledge). For more information and to apply: https://www.balticanaloglab.lv/workshops/16mm-optical-print-%2B-colour-printing

Meanwhile, two musicians in residence will perform works created during the residency:

Natalia Rivera Riffo is a Chilean visual and sound artist based in Paris. Her work explores glaciers, water, landscape imaginaries, and ecological sensitivity through sound, drawing, video, and performance. She has presented her work internationally, developing interdisciplinary research on environmental listening and planetary fragility.

During her residency in Riga, she is working site-specifically at Lake Baltezers using a hydrophone, an omnidirectional microphone, and a piezo microphone. In parallel with her artistic practice, she creates drawings and writes words to capture and preserve the present moment, remembering the sensations of extreme cold and the sounds of ice, wind and water. She then develops compositions from these field recordings, exploring textures with the “erratic” notes of the synthesizer. At the presentation she will perform a sound ritual evolved from these compositions.

Rheece van der Linde is a South African sound artist, DJ, producer, and audio designer whose work spans electronic composition, instrument building, digital performance, and experimental media. During her time at BAL, Rheece has concentrated on experimental composition and sound design. She employs both digital and analog methods to extract and deconstruct textures and rhythms. Throughout this residency, she has sampled sounds from the modular gear at BAL and applied various generative techniques in Ableton to manipulate those recordings. This process is culminating in a live performance featuring ten original songs that she created during her time here.

The event will take place in the Baltic Analog Lab 2nd-floor residency rooms, Lienes iela 19a.

Event language: English.

Entry fee: 5 EUR (cash only).

The Baltic Analog Lab Residency is supported by the Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation.