At the edge of the Baltic Sea, where wind braids through dune grass and white swans drift along the coast, Uta Bekaia reawakens a midsummer ritual — Jāņi — a performance that emerges from the ancient pulse of the land and the artist’s own lineage of memory and myth.
Developed in Pāvilosta during the residency at the VV Foundation, Jāņi is both an homage and a reimagining of Latvia’s Solstice Day traditions and the artist’s impulse to listen to the place. The longest day becomes a tribute to the cycles of nature, to what is remembered and what endures. The work speaks in the language of fire and flora, voice and gesture — echoing the rituals of the past while folding in stories born of internal metamorphosis.
Jāņi does not unfold solely through human gesture, but in resonance with the more-than-human world. Set within Pāvilosta’s elemental landscape—where wind, sand, and sea are in constant motion— the dialogue with the more-than-human voices begins. Nature becomes an active participant: a co-creator, a collaborator, a witness.
Bekaia has shaped seven archetypes, each one stepping from the liminal spaces somewhere in between mythologies and lived experiences : Desire, War, Fear, Hope, Time, Death, and Childhood. They appear in ceremonial garb — part folklore, part future relic — their bodies inscribed with choreography drawn from the deeply personal texts whispered, spoken, or sung into the wind. And guiding them all, a white swan — native to Pāvilosta’s waters — becomes a mythic narrator, not as a symbol but as a being with voice and agency.
Through this procession of figures, Jāņi becomes a rite of passage. It is a weaving of grief and joy, of ancestral knowledge and interspecies futures. The performance embraces the solstice as a portal — a luminous threshold where endings become beginnings, where decay births renewal.
Jāņi invites us not only to witness, but to remember — the shimmer of dust dancing in a beam of light, the heartbeat of first love, the quiet grace of self-forgiveness, the courage to be seen rather than to disappear, and the stubborn, fragile beauty that endures even in the wake of ruin. It asks us to gather around the fire once more, to sit with the stories that made us, and to walk once again into the turning of the earth.
