Evanescent Road

Neatgriešanās | no return - latvian museum of photography. 2018

of them. In 1981, when she was twelve, her family moved to Kolyma in the Soviet Far East. At that time, she perceived this as a deportation. Only after decades did she realize that they were not the first of her family to abandon home, travel to the unknown and adapt to extreme conditions. Various of her closest relatives had been deported to Siberian labour settlements at a very young age, a few decades earlier.

“NEATGRIEŠANĀS” weaves together these two apparently disconnected narrative threads with backdrop of the vast geographical territories of Siberia.The Children of Siberian Gulag and Evanescent Road series featured herechart the destiny of these two generations in the early Soviet occupation in Latvia (1940-1956) and in the 1980s, before Independence. Licis-Ribak’s photographs, in tandem with her family archives, diaries, and other records, reveal not just the history, contradictions and duality of a single family but the overall fate of Latvian society in the 20th century.

evanescent road - gaistošais ceļš

In 1981, when I was 12 years old, my family moved from Riga to a small closed town on the Kolyma River in Russia’s far northeast. We remained there until 1986. I returned there again only in 2014, driven by curiosity, and by the unexpected connection I found between Chersky, originally founded as a Gulag forced labour camp, and the “Children of Gulag”series I had been working on.

My original intent behind the “Evanescent Road”project was to reveal today’s life in Chersky. Some time after my return trip there, I discovered in my home closet in the U.S. an old film I had exposed and developed in Chersky as a 15-year old. This discovery, along with my father’s black and white photographs from Chersky, turned the project inside out.

“Evanescent Road” comes from this looking back and inwards. Like the Gulag children, I ask myself, can we find traces of ourselves in the places we once inhabited? Can the road that is our life’s path be revealed to us more clearly from there? And more importantly, how do we find our way back home? After all, we all long to return to our roots. For some, the way back home may take a whole lifetime. For many others, deemed to remain in a no man’s land, it is impossible. It is not by chance that Latvian has invented a word such as “neatgriešanās” (“no-return”).