From 21 to 23 August, PAiR Residency in Pāvilosta hosted the Coastal Poetry Festival, organised by VV Foundation. Its programme included poetry readings, cinema, music, and creative activities for children and young people. Over three days, the festival explored the Kurzeme coast as a landscape, a living environment, and a repository of cultural memory, bringing together talented artists from various disciplines.

The festival received an enthusiastic response, with all its events attracting broad audiences. The Saturday evening film concert Moments & Eternities. B4 Content, created by the band Alejas together with filmmaker Dāvis Gauja, was particularly well attended. Every seat was taken, and visitors filled the remaining space in the Pāvilosta Culture House.

The festival opened with the outdoor film screening Poetic Wanderings Along the Baltic Sea. Introduced by film researcher Zane Krūmiņa, the programme brought together documentaries made during different periods, presenting the Baltic Sea coast as a multilayered space shaped by nature, human experience, and cultural memory.

Saturday’s poetry reading featured Ivars Šteinbergs, Kirils Ēcis, Ausma Perons, Lote Vilma, and US poet and performance artist Kyle Dacuyan. Dacuyan’s poems were translated into Latvian especially for the festival, allowing local audiences to experience his work in both the original language and translation while demonstrating PAiR’s commitment to building connections between Latvian and international cultural spheres. Bringing together distinctive voices from one of today’s most active generations of writers, the reading became one of the festival’s central events.

Sunday’s programme began with a comics workshop for children and young people led by Roberts Vilsons and Lote Vilma. The festival concluded with an evening dedicated to the poetry and music of Federico García Lorca, featuring New Riga Theatre actors Guna Zariņa and Gerds Lapoška alongside musicians Ilze Grunte, Andris Grunte, and Dace Ignatova. In the programme, based on the performance A Knife Lodged in the Heart, Lorca’s poetry intertwined with the music of Haralds Sīmanis, bringing the festival to an emotionally resonant close.

Reflecting on the festival, its curator Henriks Eliass Zegners said: “I am delighted both by all the artistic events we experienced, which together formed a rich and diverse series spanning multiple genres, and by the audience’s response. I particularly appreciated the interest shown by residents of the surrounding area, who came despite the severe storm on Saturday. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the residency team for our work together, and I hope the festival can continue in the future.”

The festival’s success demonstrated the public’s interest in interdisciplinary cultural events beyond Riga and strengthened the role of the Pāvilosta Artist Residency within Latvia’s contemporary cultural landscape.

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