Marginalia will be our major outdoor sculptural installation in the courtyard of Liepāja Museum, opposite the main entrance. It is part of the Liepāja 2027 public-art programme, alongside projects by Aigars Bikše, Rebecca Korn, Inta Ruka, and other invited artists.
Marginalia is a natural continuation of Skuja Braden’s earlier project Living Outside the Home, which initially explored attitudes towards dogs and dog owners in Latvia. The doghouse remains the emotional and visual point of departure, symbolising a small refuge beyond the protected centre of the home.
From this starting point, the project expands into a broader narrative about people, memories and experiences that have remained on the margins of society and its dominant cultural and historical narratives. The work may also incorporate fragments of everyday life in Liepāja: details of local architecture, fences, maps, street names, images of the harbour and the sea, traces of migration, found words, notes and objects.
The title Marginalia refers to notes, drawings, symbols and personal observations that are traditionally marginalised. Although situated outside the official text, they often preserve the most personal memories, humour, protest, affection and truth.
At the centre of the sculpture is a small, fragile doghouse that appears to be disintegrating and exploding from within. Large, soft, cushion-like ceramic forms would extend from the corner of the museum’s concrete fence. Within them, the planks of the doghouse intertwine with dogs, bowls, collars, bones, toys, books, apples, snakes, notes, words, domestic objects and other remnants of contemporary everyday life.
