Why Artists Are Travelling to This Tiny Town on Latvia’s Baltic Coast

The drive from Riga to Pāvilosta takes just over two hours, meandering through forests, farmland and bucolic villages where countless white storks nest. Their enormous homes perch precariously on telephone poles, some so large they appear to outweigh the structures beneath them. In Latvia, the majestic bird is known as svētelis, meaning “saint” or “blesser.” Believed to bring prosperity and protection, their return each spring marks the renewal of life. Seeing so many of these creatures on the journey west, it’s hard not to read a little poetry into the landscape.

Pāvilosta Artist in Residency, or PAiR, an initiative of the VV Foundation, is housed in a restored 1901 wooden building just a short walk from the sea. Here, artists, writers, researchers and curators from around the world are given something deceptively simple: time, space and the freedom not to know exactly where either might lead.

For co-founder Vita Liberte, that could only happen here.

“Pāvilosta has a very particular energy. It sits on the edge of the Baltic Sea, somewhat removed from the pace and demands of city life, yet it is deeply connected to nature, history, and community,” she tells me. “When I first spent time there, I felt that rare combination of openness and calm. A place where you can truly listen to your thoughts and become more attentive to the world around you.”

She speaks less about productivity than about attention. “I have always believed that environment shapes creativity. In Pāvilosta, artists are given the gift of time and space, without constant distraction.” The landscape, she says, “encourages reflection and experimentation,” allowing artists “to step away from expectations and reconnect with the reasons they create in the first place.”

That absence of expectation sits at the heart of PAiR. Residents are not asked to produce an exhibition or finish a project before they leave. “The residency is based on trust. Trust in the artist and trust in the creative process,” Liberte explains. “Not everything meaningful can be documented at the end of a residency. Sometimes the most important transformations are invisible and only become apparent months or even years later.”

It is a philosophy that seems to shape the artists’ experiences in different ways.

For Kim Hankyul, who lives in Oslo, the residency became an opportunity to let research develop organically rather than arriving with fixed conclusions. “I approached the residency with an open mind, carrying only loose connections between these interests rather than a fixed research agenda. I wanted to see how my ideas would develop through interactions with the other residents, the place itself, and the conversations that emerged over time.”

Those conversations became central to his thinking. One discussion about immigration and language stayed with him throughout the residency. “Experiencing Latvia’s social and political landscape made me more aware of how borders are sustained not only through geography or legislation, but also through language, memory, and shared beliefs about belonging.”

Liberte hopes exactly these kinds of exchanges will happen. “One of the most exciting aspects of a residency is the unexpected encounter. The conversations that happen over breakfast, during a walk by the sea, or late in the evening after a day in the studio.” Rather than engineering collaborations, she says, “I hope for genuine curiosity.”

After lunch, we walk down to the beach. The Baltic stretches into the distance, while beneath our feet the shoreline is scattered with fragments of amber. Within minutes of sifting through the sand I have gathered a small handful. There is something wondrous about finding a material that began as resin flowing from prehistoric pine forests more than fifty million years ago. Known as Baltic gold, amber has shaped Latvia’s history for centuries, travelling south along the Amber Road to the Mediterranean while remaining deeply embedded in local folklore. It continues to inspire new forms of research, most recently through PAiR’s symposium Elektron: The Future of Amber, which brought together artists, scientists and researchers to reconsider the material from diverse perspectives.

That dialogue between disciplines is something Liberte has carefully cultivated. “I am often interested in bringing together people whose practices, backgrounds, generations, or disciplines might not naturally intersect,” she says. “A visual artist, a composer, a writer, a philosopher, or a curator may approach the world from very different perspectives, but those differences can be incredibly generative.”

Lithuanian artist Elena Narbutaitė shares with me: “I wasn’t familiar with PAiR, because I rarely go to residencies.” It was only after a recommendation from curator Tom Engels that she discovered “it is a place to come to study and to work in a peaceful environment.” Her own understanding of artistic discovery is similarly open ended. “In art, I’d like to surprise myself first of all.”

For Bangladeshi artist and filmmaker Omar Chowdhury, unfamiliarity is precisely what makes a residency productive. “Working somewhere unfamiliar intensifies this instability. Observation can quickly become projection, while partial knowledge begins producing surprisingly elaborate narratives.” Rather than trying to explain Pāvilosta, he says he hopes “to construct a world from incomplete recollections, local encounters, borrowed histories, and mistaken connections.”

Listening to the residents, it becomes clear that PAiR is less interested in producing finished works than creating the conditions in which new ways of thinking can emerge. That requires patience, trust and a willingness to leave with questions rather than answers. As Liberte puts it, “By removing expectations around production, we create the conditions for genuine experimentation, risk taking, and intellectual freedom.” In a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by measurable outcomes, that feels like a valuable proposition.

The residencies are primarily by invitation, with an annual open call for artists from the Baltic region. Applications are reviewed by the VV Foundation team in collaboration with curator Krist Gruijthuijsen and an international advisory board.



Feature image: Mākslas Terapija, 2023. Courtesy VV Foundation