I Bit the Skin of a Glass Lagoon
Korn, Rebecca and Shneps-Shneppe, Anastasia (2025) I Bit the Skin of a Glass Lagoon. [Exhibition/show, Installation, Performance, Photography, Sculpture]
‘We ebb and flow across time and space – body, to body, to body, to body’. (Astrida Neimanis)
Starting with the question, what legacies do we carry within us related to place, especially concerning landscapes only partially known? This interdisciplinary research project explores the body as a receptacle for intergenerational memory.
Neither Korn nor Shneps-Shneppe grew up in the Baltics, but both of have familial ties to the region. Working with water – as material, metaphor, collaborator - and inspired by research into how bodies store experiences, alongside Astrida Neimanis’ concept of Hydrofeminism, a watery archaeology was developed that thinks through water as a receptacle and carrier of memory. The idea of fixed roots is questioned, offering instead liquid roots – histories that flow across time, bodies and borders.
The project unfolds as an embodied cartography, a way of sensing and tracing those liquid roots. Travelling to sites tied to their familial histories, the artists immersed themselves in ancestral waters and gathered samples from each location. Collected waters were used to soup analogue film and inform glass-blown sculptures* that echo aquatic microorganisms** and the body’s internal memory systems – guts, tissues, neural networks. Here, water acts as archive and agent, holding, distorting, and translating the past in a language as fluid as memory itself.
*Made in collaboration with glass-blowers from Glass Remis, Lithuania and Aleksandrs Logvins at Livani Glass and Craft Centre, Latvia
**With many thanks to Hydrobiologists Ilga Kokorite and Lelde Ozolina for their guidance, support and access to microscopes.
The work was exhibited alongside Latvian artist Laimdota Malle. With the rhythm of ebb and flow, I Bit the Skin of a Glass Lagoon, pulls us into a space of sensory collision between each body of work. The title itself suggests a tactile encounter with fragility – delicate, sensual, and uncanny. Working with materials that evoke skin and glass – vulnerable, soft, translucent, or gleaming – the lagoon becomes a metaphor for a world both seductive and breakable, ephemeral and intimate. I Bit the Skin of a Glass Lagoon is an invitation to sense with and through fragile materialities. It speaks of those experiences we may not recognise or remember, but which live on in our skin and in the waters that shaped us. What we bite may bruise. What we touch may ripple. What we unconsciously carry may finally speak.
Composer and experimental musician Sarma Gabrena created an ethereal soundscape for the exhibition, inspired by the exhibitions themes, concepts, materials and their associations.
Performance: Fluidarities unfolded as a live response to I Bit the Skin of a Glass Lagoon during Riga’s ‘White Nights’ event. Dancers and musicians traced the installations undercurrents through movement and sound, weaving a multisensory field of fluidarity and relationality. The performance gradually liquefied into a musical improvisation, immersed in the live projections of artist Laimdota Malle.
Musicians: Kristiana Karklina, Sarma Gabrena. Dancers: Arina Bubovicha, Beate Leva Rose, Alina Mihailovala.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2076-8732 and Shneps-Shneppe, Anastasia
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