OMEGA 3

The artist-run art centre Totaldobže (LV) and the artist-run space MoKS (EE) invite you to take part in contemporary art exhibition OMEGA 3, which will take place in Mooste Seed Sorting Factory (Mooste Estonia) from July 2^nd – August 1^st 2016.

The OMEGA 3 exhibition is curated by Kaspars Lielgalvis (the head of Totaldobže Art Centre) and facilitated together with MoKS.

 

The Mooste Seed Sorting Factory was built in 1970s and is still active using the old-fashioned machinery in spite of impressive changes not only in the local economy, but also in the agriculture industry globally over the last fifty years.

The concept of the exhibition has been built around the industrial facility itself and several strands of historical, social and technical significance:

Architecture
The exterior of the building is not worth mentioning, but the interior is quite opposite – rich with surprises thanks to a complex maze of machinery, which consists of massive shaking boxes, containers, and nearly hundred different lengths and widths of pipes and tubes for transportating sorted seeds, grains and waste. The size of whole machinery is around 20m by 10m with height of 14m. For maintenance, there are 3 platforms linked by stairs.

 

Transformation
Established as experimental facility aiming to develop a flax industry in Soviet Baltic region, the factory has experienced changes in usage several times over a period of five decades. Still using the same machinery, the factory is still used for sorting different kinds of seeds and grains today. In recent years the factory has transformed into a cinematic heritage site from the mechanization era of agriculture, kept alive by enthusiasts, who for several reasons do not want to or are not able to keep up with contemporary technologies.

 

Sorting
Farmers bring their harvest to the factory to clean it from the waste and to sort seeds and grains by size and weight. The harvested raw material goes through shaking, blowing and sieving phases several times until all waste is removed and the seeds are accurately sorted.

 

Workers
The machinery is out of date in comparison with newer technologies, but it serves well as a working place for its employees and is part of a larger agriculture enterprise, which produces human- and eco-friendly products from flax seeds – linseed oil and linseed flour. Upgrading the machinery most probably would rise the price of the production and quite possibly bankrupt for the whole enterprise.

 

Omega 3
Linseeds naturally contains lots of healthy minerals for the human body, but the most important today is the fatty acid Omega 3. French physician David Servan-Schreiber indicated the connection between massive food industrialization and the widespread outbreak of cancer since 1940s. Agrochemicals besides other impacts on food, destroy the balance between fatty acids decreasing level of Omega 3 in vegetables, fruits, meat, bread, milk products and eggs, which we use every day, even when trying to feed our bodies with the healthiest available food. In comparison with other plants, linseed is one of the richest sources of Omega 3.

 

In light of these concepts there are many other aspects related to the existence of this factory which can be communicated through art works for the exhibition once you start to think more broadly.

 

Here are just few ideas, generated during the last Black Holes creative workshop, that took place 5 min walking distance from the Mooste Seed Sorting Factory at the artist-run residency center MoKS, from 23/11-14/12/2015:
 

• Celebration of the factory as an act of written history – what makes memory? What makes an object become valuable and worth preserving as a heritage – educational sample for society today and in the future?

• How can existing industry can be reshaped in order to produce healthy products in an eco-friendly way, helping activate more responsible co-existence in global and local changes.

• Appearance and disappearance of man made objects, new relations between man made objects, the environment, and people.

• Seeds as particles. Particles as elements of something whole.

...

At the opening event of the exhibition on the 2^nd of July we plan a concert of musical compositions developed by Linda Leimane (LV) and Marianna Liik (EE) from their ideas discovered during the initial Black Holes creative workshop, that took place at MoKS. Two composers of contemporary academic music and two multidisciplinary artists Voldemārs Johansons (LV) and Taavi Suisalu (EE) were invited to work 3 weeks together on creation of ideas for new art works. The workshop was moderated by Kaspars Lielgalvis, who proposed to keep in mind the Mooste Seed Sorting Factory as a potential venue for their new works. Laterally the workshop's focus on the factory switched from being a potential concert and exhibition venue to an object of concept for the art works that were developed for an exhibition.