Tina Remiz is a documentary storyteller and visual artist of Latvian origin, living on a canal boat in London. Since graduating from BA Photographic Arts at the University of Westminster in 2012, Tina has been working as a freelance photographer, specializing in reportage and portraiture. A lot of Tina’s personal work is concerned with the issues of migration and cultural identity, as she reflect on her personal experience of growing up in the post-Soviet Latvia and immigrating to the West in late teens. What makes people to identify themselves as representatives of a particular culture, what are the manifestations of the national identity and how do they change when the person moves to live in another country are the questions that inspire many of my projects.
Where the Pigeons Roost
“I lost my father at the age of 12.
12 years on, I try to get to know him better.
My father was born in the city of Tver, located between the two Russian capitals – Moscow and St. Petersburg – and our close relatives still live there to this day. He liked to speak about his childhood, remembering film screenings at the local Star cinema, garlic patties his mother used to bake and a pigeon loft allegedly owned by our ancestor that gave the surname Golubevi (Russian for ‘pigeon’) to our kin. I often imagined my father’s life in Tver, drawing my own narratives from his stories, faded photographs in family albums and the Soviet cinematography, but I never travelled to his hometown while my father was alive and only met our relatives for the first time at his funeral. Visiting the modern Tver, I try to see the place and the people through my father’s eyes. Viewed through the prism of time, they become memories of memories, merging the past, the present and the imagined. I invite my father’s stories into my own narratives. This work is our first collaboration.”
To view more of Tina’s work please visit her website.