«I am a person of fragments, I walk through life with zoom-in glasses and collect small shots. As the main character in Wim Wenders’ film The Lisbon Story was catching sounds, so I look for semi-invisible little things that colour and make life playful. My nice touch is — it all starts with texture. When creating costumes for a show, first of all, I go to the costume warehouse to go through the clothes — they stand like ghosts in silence, saturated with all of the dramatic energy from performances that have already finished. There I walk slowly along the row of empty sleeves — the jacket speaks through the material, the dress — through the patina, the texture. This is always the beginning of any show — find the base in the warehouse, then you can start building a community around that vest with worn buttons from RDA fashion, sewn or new things. The old has always interested and inspired me more than the new and sleek, which has no history yet — be it fabric, tin, or a doorknob.

The long-term cooperation with the director Pēteris Krilovs is very important to me — he has trained and sharpened my understanding and perception of the fact that the close-up has great power and that a grease stain on the lapel of a tailcoat can tell a wordless monologue parallel to the actor’s text. I admire minimalists to some extent, but I prefer eclecticism and wrongness — it’s more interesting to me. When working with space — creating scenography for performances, films, interiors or exhibitions, I try to catch the general mood of the work and then, guided by it, I start to build it in my head and derive the way the idea continues spatially.»

Kristīne Abika has obtained a bachelor’s degree in scenography and a master’s degree in painting at the Latvian Academy of Arts. She has created costumes and stage sets for performances both in Latvia and abroad, and her artworks have been displayed in more than ten personal exhibitions. This season, Kristīne will work on four theater performances, while continuing the work on the systematisation of Riga Circus costume archive. At the same time, she is working on her next solo exhibition, which she plans to exhibit in Riga, and is waiting for the premiere of Pēteris Krilovs’ film The Red Barn, in which she worked as a film artist.