Memories From The Future:
Exploring The Fortress As A Woman

After her lecture and film screening at Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre in 2017, Ana Maria Asan comes back the following summer as an artist-in residence, invited by the Centre.

Fragments of objects, fragments of stories, the remains of the Daugavpils Fortress - where the Centre is set - functioned as a catalyst for the artist who connected the present to the past and the future in the project entitled Memories From The Future: Exploring The Fortress As A Woman.

In 2018, Latvia was going to celebrate 100 years of independence and, while restoring an important historical monument inside the Fortress, the remains of a time capsule were found. The object was meant to preserve the memory (the documents and the names of the 44 soldiers) of the Aizpute Latvian Regiment who fought for the State independence. During the communist era, the bust of one of the worst dictators of all time crushed this fragile object under its weight, which resembles the fate of the Latvian people itself at that time. Impressed by the lost identity of these soldiers and their loneliness facing the cruelty of the Northern winter, Ana Maria created the site specific installation To The Unknown. It includes several art works made in white stoneware, porcelain and textile dialoging with the Fortress Museum’s objects themselves. Among them, The Way Back Home recalls the unbelievable journey undertaken by the Latvian Troickas Batalion, from China to the Suez Canal, the Pyrenees and the Baltic Sea, to join at the end, after years, their own country as a result of having been pushed by the Red Army from Latvia through Eurasia.