ARMPIT

"Armpit. Initial visuals are of a hairy, possibly sweaty, mal armpit. The Latvian Pavilion truly is a male world, delving into the daily creativity of post-Soviet space and time."
/Ieva Astahovska/

"Some of the garages have been adapted for living. Others serve as hobby workshops. In some, cars are still kept. It is a closed male commune. A convent for retired blue collars from Soviet economy and engineers from factories closed in the course of neo-liberal reforms. With the enthusiasm of alchemists they are continuing to occupy themselves with inventing new mechanical devices or re-soldering microcircuits pulled out of second-hand gadgets."
/Kaspars Vanags/

"The story of garage men inhabiting the periphery of Europe is a pastoral of the digital age. The ability to take apart and put together a car engine is about the same as it was in 1845 for Henry David Thoreau to “borrow an ax, go to the forest, and begin to fell some rather young, tall and slender pine-trees” with an aim to build a hermit’s shack for himself."
/Kaspars Vanags/

"[...] I remember the feeling of running my fingers over the ends of a bundle or stack of wooden sticks. The feeling is very strong and very old, certainly prelinguistic, and extremely intimate and charged."
/David Levi Strauss, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual/

"The emergence of Soviet garages was a part of the process of privatization of private life in the country. [...] Garages were usually located relatively far from owners' houses, so from the very beginning the garages demanded the role of a "second home""
/Kirill Kobrin/

"The workshops set up in the cooperative garages represent a closed microcosm where the socio-economic environment has blended with personal space. The creative activities of the particular community are both the trade and hobby of the individual entrepreneurs. Self-exploitation as a leisure time activity is a time capsule where neoliberalism has enclosed the postindustrial proletariat."
/Kaspars Vanags/

"The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced."
/Nick Land, Fanged Noumena/

"Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with
Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life."
/Karl Marx, a socialist/

"How does a man create? He creates a different reality, another world with its own rules. A man creates an instruction for a different reality and, while creating it, is guided by it. Skyscrapers, typewriters, convertibles, trumpets, football, chess etc."
/Marts Pujāts, a poet/

"A man is simply a dreamer. He has to imagine, fantasize and invent."
/Marts Pujāts, a poet/

"When these men are busy doing their thing and you look at their faces, it is not really clear whether they are jerking off or filing something. Their faces are tense, their breathing is irregular, droplets of sweat are covering their foreheads, their movements are rhythmical and monotonous."
/Oksana, a high-school teacher/

"They [Soviet garages] are just empty spaces that can be filled with nostalgia, fear, joy, hatred, disgust; with anything you want."
/Kirill Kobrin/

"Well, get into an argument with your wife. Where are you going to run to? If you’re a regular fellow, who doesn’t go to a café, salivating over his glass of beer? To the garage!"

"Diagnosis is what matters in repairs."

"I’m an instrument mechanic. And a plumber. And a lorryloader boss. I do everything. I can do it all. Very slowly. Got golden hands!"

"See – either you have golden hands or you don’t?"

"Depression sets in for me in October. Nothing upsets me like migrating birds. That’s the most difficult time of all, when the birds fly off."

"I really respect the Commandments. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t envy. And man hasn’t evolved from monkeys."

"About a hundred years ago, all musical instruments were tuned half a tone higher than God’s frequency, so that there would be a discord with the human organism and therefore a better market for pharmacists. We were all tuned off God’s frequency."

"This is a home-made arbalest. We thought it up right here. And the beauty of it is hidden where – you draw it back with your whole strength, but, when it’s drawn, you can hold it with one finger, the whole secret is in the sprocket wheel! It can be aimed easily."

"For them the main thing was not what you’d invented, but whether there was an analogue around the world. See, that’s the most horrible job – to find out, whether there’s been a previous analogue. We searched for a year."

"The Masons rule over the world, everyone knows that! The destruction of humanity, that’s where it’s leading. Prostitution, pornography, and so on."

"If people have arrived here from Mars, then the question arises – how did they evolve there on Mars? Someone has created the human. Genetic engineering. Successfully or unsuccessfully? Unsuccessfully, I think, as people kill each other, and that’s not right."

"I built my garage myself. With my own little hands. I was the builder and the electrician. Everything, with my own little hands."

"This is a place to spend some time. To think. When it’s warm, one can even go for a swim. There are no women here. Very few women."