Artist
Ieva Raudsepa
Ieva Raudsepa (b. 1992, Latvia) holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Latvia and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been featured in i-D, The Guardian, Wallpaper, It’s Nice That, the Latvian Photography Yearbook, and elsewhere. Her series Cruise was part of the exhibition MIXTAPE at the Riga Photomonth 2016, while the book dummy was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2016, Amsterdam, and is now released by Milda Books. In Spring 2018 her work was part of Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe at the Calvert 22 Foundation, London. Her exhibition It Could Just Swallow You Up at the ISSP Gallery in Riga opened July 2019.
Cruise
Cruise is a story about coming of age. An overnight ferry ride from Riga to Stockholm turns into a metaphor for the transitional space between being a teenager and becoming an adult. Youth is a fleeting phenomenon that is both painful and beautiful, just like the contrast between the trashy interior of the ferry and the beauty of the sea. Trips on the ferry evoke a sort of nostalgia for the present that will soon be past—the sea surrounding the party is magnificent, but it is also a vast nothingness, ready to just swallow us up.
Connecting Eastern and Western Europe, the ferry is popular among young people. Tickets are cheap and it's a good way to get away from their parents' and let themselves go. The ferry provides all kinds of entertainment — karaoke, an evening show with a flamboyant dance performance, gambling halls, a lottery, and a disco hall. The entertainment is sort of cliché and sometimes absurd but its very banality mirrors the awkwardness of what it means to be very young and living in a state of both personal and societal transition.
The project was published as a book by Milda Books in 2019: https://www.mildabooks.com/product/cruise