Katrīna’s Tongue

Sergej Timofejev

Katerina’s Tongue

For three days I had a premonition
of having a black tongue. I just stood there,
quietly smoking, giggling nervously,
not saying a word to my mother.
And the next morning I took a look –
and it was there! A pitch-black tongue
in a pinkish mouth, an exclamation mark
in the habitual physiological text, an alarm,
an emergency cable. Horrified,
I dialed the pharmacy: ‘Could you please
tell me how to cure a black tongue?’
They were quite pleasant: ‘The human tongue tends to be
kind of pink, kind of black. It all depends on the angle,
on your source of light…’ I threw down the receiver in shock,
rushed to the car, revved up the engine,
then drove around town for four hours,
making strange turns, hands shaking, but then – a flash:
‘How about our friend, the doctor? I recall from my childhood
how he sat in our kitchen drinking coffee and talking
politics, talking literature, so well-groomed,
so suave.’ I run to the phone again: ‘Help me!’
‘Calm down! Just get yourself over here!’ he replies.
So here I am now. He gets some gadget made
from the latest new metal, but I tell him:
‘My tongue is so black, you don’t need this to see!’
He approaches me anyway, a long tube in his hands.
I open my mouth. ‘Oooh!’ – he jumps back
in awe. The blackness of my black tongue is so very
concrete. But, of course, he will not cave in to his fear:
‘Exhaustion, stress and the pain of creation,
They are to blame, but the pills are sure to help,
these white, colourfast pills.’ So I swallowed
a mouthful of chemistry, got in the car,
took to bed as soon as I got home and fell asleep right away.
Next morning I ran to the mirror – oh yes!
I’ve got my pink one, my precious one back!
Astir, a cuddle in the dawn light.
‘Thank you, doctor!’ I called him at once,
but still not a word to my mother.
Grown up now, I am more reticent.
I speak much less, simply not sure
of my tongue’s colour, afraid to spot it reflected
in the eye of another – that pitch black strip,
that piece of strange, stubborn flesh.

transl. by

Katrīna Neiburga is one of the most outstanding contemporary Latvian artists. She lives and works in Riga. Her main medium is video or the moving image in general. As Laine Kristberga writes in her essay on Neiburga’s practice:

Neiburga uses the camera as a magnifying glass, expressing a socio-anthropological interest in the everyday, and zooming in on ordinary people leading ordinary lives. By providing a close look at somewhat unnoticed or ignored phenomena, she unearths micro-worlds, and provides visibility to people, objects, settings and stories which would otherwise not be told, because in our stressful world of deadlines and missed opportunities, there is a good chance that we might regard them as too mundane or self-explanatory.

Katrīna Neiburga makes art in pursuit of emotion, authenticity, the preservation of living memory. Her practice is poetry at the level of perception – it operates with atmosphere rather than with representation. A deeply personal iconography runs through everything she makes, from video installations to theatre set designs, while her sociological curiosity draws her toward the unspoken assumptions underlying our understanding of things. There is something of the ragana in her practice — that figure from Latvian folklore whose name derives from redzēt, to see, and whose power lies not in spectacle but in a different, more patient kind of vision. Like her, Neiburga moves through the overlooked edges of the world, gathering what others dismiss, and transforming it into something that feels, suddenly, charged with meaning.

This sensibility runs through each of her works, which return again and again to the earth — to ritual, to the things buried and unearthed, to the cycles of disappearance and return.

In Kūku Marija she digs a hole in the earth:

When life becomes too much to bear — you ought to lie down in a hole in the ground and ask someone to bury you. Spend some time in there absorbing Earth’s energy. As you crawl out, assume a new name and live on like there’s nothing to it.

To lie down in the hole — this simple gesture becomes a rite of passage. She re-appears from the Earth, head first, then the rest of the body, like a newborn. The story of a strange wisdom begins here: as a possibility of constant return.

Sekretijki starts with a story:

In my childhood, we often played a very special and mysterious game called “Sekretjiki” in the yard. Each child would bury treasures in a special place — under the broken glass of a bottle, we would make a composition out of very precious trinkets we found: a bead, a flower, a piece of stone, a bottle cork, and other things. The aim was to create a secret known only to you, which, we hoped, would at some point be discovered by a friend who couldn’t help but be amazed by the uniqueness of your secret. In Wilderness, I replicated this game with my son, assembling huge “sekretjiks” and hiding them under car windscreens. We assembled my treasures picked up over the years on the seashore, a place very different from Drusti, in large magical compositions in the middle of the forest.

In the Savvaļa forest where the piece was installed, the visitor looked down at the small, rectangular, glass pond placed between the trees. They had to walk off the more and more invisible path to stand at its edge, bending over to avoid branches. In that strange position shaped by the forest around them, with their body reflecting it, they looked through the glass panel and saw little and bigger white bones, a skull, remains of once living beings — evidence of death composed together with small sticks and objects to form a non-human, little but monstrous figure. Material secrets gathered by Neiburga during many years and exposed under car windscreens in the forest are obscenities that belong to the earth. They are secrets and secretions. The earth’s uncanny guts.

Malleus Maleficarum started with a pact. Iveta Pole, Katrīna Neiburga, Agnese Krivade, Jette Loona Hermanis, Anika Barkan (Denmark), Lea Blau (Croatia), Maarja Nuut (Estonia), Martina Georgina (Malta), Irēna Grauda, Kristiāns Aglonietis, Anna Ansone, and Karolin Tamm (Estonia) found the infamous book — the Hammer of Witches — and read it together. They state:

It is a witch-hunting manual, one which develops a legal-theological theory on the nature of women, portraying the female world as a dark, inverted mirror to our “normal” world. Most evil among all women are the concubines, followed by midwives and the wives who dominate their husbands.

Through art, the manual becomes something else entirely: a powerful score of different ways of being. The faint marks of other, violently ended existences are reclaimed through performative gesture and precise mise-en-scène — wrested back from the logic of the hammer, and returned to those it sought to destroy.

Neiburga:

Viscum album, mistletoe, was the magic plant of the druids, and in Latvia is also called “wind besom” or “wind broom”. At summer solstice the main priest would cut it off the oak, birch or pine with a golden sickle. The mistletoe would fall on a snow-white sheet held by two to four virgins. According to the druids, the plant could cure any malady.

The plant should be brought home and kept in the shade. After a week, make a potion of the wind besom. Consume it in small sips before igniting scented herbs — lavender, pine, or juniper. Then close your eyes, covering them with a silk scarf, and lie down on the mistletoe. An unlit lantern should be placed nearby. You should not consciously look for answers but simply relax and delve into the darkness, imagining it as a water-filled tunnel through which you must swim. You can then sleep or doze until the realisation strikes that you should sit up and light the lantern. Look into the bright light, then turn it off again — and then you will see visions, scenes, or even hear voices that will answer the question that has been tormenting you.

A note on witches’ broom: what folklore calls the thunderbesom or wind besom is, botanically speaking, a thickening of branches in the crown of a tree — in conifers, the result of genetic mutation; in deciduous trees, caused by the fungus Taphrinaceae, which makes it not a deviation but a disease. Sometimes the diameter of a witches’ broom can reach several metres. The line between the marvellous and the pathological, it turns out, is thinner than we think.

For this work, Katrīna Neiburga immerses herself in the myths and stories of the forest — its spirits, its mysteries, its Krampus. She chose a traditional hut and the surrounding woodland as the setting for her artistic exploration of the Lake Grundlsee region, moving through it as one moves through a living archive: attentively, unhurriedly, open to encounter. Among the figures she met there was Burgl Schramml, a local Aussee native, whom she drew gently into the secrets of the forest. The music, composed by Anna Fišere in collaboration with Latvian musicians, weaves together a range of instruments into a score that feels as layered as the landscape itself. The result is a work that holds anthropological curiosity and free imagination in equal tension — rooted in the myths, stories and memories the artist gathered in the region, yet reaching toward something altogether more untamed.

At one point the frame is dominated by a lush, moss-covered forest floor — fallen logs, dead leaves, and dense green growth filling almost the entire image. From between two moss-covered logs, barely above the ground, peers the head of an elderly person with short grey hair, their eyes just visible above the bark. The effect is uncanny: the figure seems to emerge from the forest itself, as if grown from it or swallowed by it, the boundary between human and woodland almost dissolved. A subtitle reads: “An animal? hm - no…” — sitting somewhere between humour and unease, it captures something essential about the work’s spirit. The figure is neither fully human nor fully of the forest, caught in that liminal space Neiburga returns to again and again: the threshold where the self dissolves, and something older, stranger, takes its place.