The Crown of It All

This is a special piece, I'd say first culmination of my studies in Cultural Heritage field. As you may know, Soviet built heritage is my thing and in my practice I always try to push boundaries and this is exactly that. So the crown is a version of a Latvian folk dress crown from Bārta / Nīca region, which was the most used in Soviet propaganda. Latvian national dress varies by region and they can be quite bright and decorated, but Rīgas folk costume, I felt, wasn’t representative of the capital nearly enough. When I say folk dress, I am talking about 19th century folk dress that now is used as a celebratory, honorary pieces of clothing, that get worn to national cultural events to show affiliation to your region, and show national pride. So, Rīga has a rather plain folk dress compared to other regions, so I took it upon myself to start creating my own version of it. The main conditions that come into play regarding traditional national dress is, as I mentioned, regional affiliation, womans marital status and a time frame. I took these and decided I will take my microrayon Mežciems for my region, time frame - current, and for being a married woman, traditionally I shouldn't wear the beaded, structured crown, but I will do anyway and will not feel guilty about it. So I made a crown for myself to include contested microrayons into the exclusive definition of what it means to be a Latvian.