Digne Udre-Lielbarde will defend her doctoral thesis “Latvian Folk Ornament and Mythology Nexus as a Revival: Contested Historical Layers, Visualized Ideologies, and Commodified Creativity”

 

Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (University of Tartu)
Opponents: dr. Mr. Frog (University of Helisnki), dr. Alessandro Testa (Charles University of Prague)
 

Venue: Senate hall (Ülikooli 18–204) and via Zoom (Meeting ID: 969 2695 8402, Passcode: 093546).

Summary:

The dissertation is theoretically grounded in folklore studies and explores the combination of folk ornament and mythology in Latvian culture. Besides exploring folk ornament in contemporary settings shaped by a neoliberal market economy, the dissertation analyzes the origins of the folk ornament and mythology nexus, showing it to be rooted in interwar Latvia (1918–1940) and the works of Latvian artist Ernests Brastiņš (1892–1942). As argued in the dissertation, the origins of folk ornament and mythology nexus and its further development is best approached as a folk revival characterized by a renewed, politically motivated interest in and appreciation of traditional cultural expressions, involving their rediscovery, reinterpretation, and popularization. Covering different periods in the history of Latvia, the dissertation explores the restrictions imposed on the interpretation of folk ornament by the Soviet occupation regime during the Stalinist period and how they played out in the intellectual biography of Latvian artist Jēkabs Bīne (1895–1955). Another period analyzed is the Singing Revolution (1986–1991) with the popularity of the eight-pointed star as one of the main visual symbols of the independence movement. Addressing contested topics, the dissertation explores the contemporary uses of ugunskrusts, the local variation of the swastika, and how they correlate with the interpretation of WWII in Latvian collective memory. Using ethnographic interviews, archival and media materials, the dissertation consists of four publications and an extensive introductory chapter, which contextualizes this research in the theory of visuality and social movement studies, Soviet postcolonial theory, and collective memory studies.