DRYGVA

In Belarusian folklore and national identity, swamps have always occupied one of the key places. Their nature if based on fluctuation and instability, the swamp is a dualism of impossibility and possibility, holy and devilishly unknown. It is always about something unsure, somewhere between water and earth, life and death, birth and resurrection. The swamp represents the origin of Belarusian identity. It's a place where dreams are born, a place where instability - in a very bizarre way - nourishes and revives. What is he, a man living in the swamps? What is he driven by?

Belarusian swamps are the lungs of Europe. Their role is extremely important in ensuring ecological balance. This, unfortunately, was realized too late, after almost a hundred years of intensive land drainage. 1 hectare of a swamp is able to purify as much air as 13 hectares of a protected forest. It's hard to believe, but the Belarusian swamps purify the air with the same efficiency as a patch of taiga the size of Poland or Italy. The swamps ensure the annual removal of about 900 thousand tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the release of 630 thousand tons of oxygen into the atmosphere. Belarusian swamps soften the climate and humidify the air throughout Europe.

Maria invites the spectator to plunge into the world of swamps and imagine it anew. As a primary source of energy, as a mystery that is revealed in a new way each time, as a dream of a perfect balance, where the hierarchy takes on archaic forms and is given over to the control of Nature and the Creator. Where the form determines being - co-existence and co-breathing instead of the dictates of homo sapiens and possession through destruction.

Drigva also proposes to pay tribute to naive art and folklore, born of co-existence with the swamp she aims to draw attention to the importance of swamps not only in European ecosystem but also to restore the vanished narrative of women artists who drew inspiration from the fragility of marsh forms. Painted carpets, weaving, paintings, lace, herbal medicine, cooking and song rituals are a gap in women's artistic practices and their almost thousand-year-old prison.

Just as swamps, Drigva is a deep experience of hundred meters square and multiple levels including a fairytale, a shared ecological reality and a human seek for identity and acknowledgment.