Kosmoss Disco-Lectures
In the mid 1970s, architecture student Hardijs Lediņš organized a series of disco-lectures in the Polytechnical Institute’s student club. At the time, the discotheque was a new entertainment phenomenon in Soviet Latvia, a “sociocultural product” from the West that introduced people to popular Western music. Lediņš occasionally spiced up his discos by sharing his views on contemporary music—during the first half of each event he gave a lecture, then played recordings.
In collaboration with stage designer Leonards Laganovskis and musician Mārtiņš Rutkis, Lediņš continued the disco-lectures at the “Kosmoss” experimental discos held in the Construction Workers’ House of Culture, Oktobris. In between educational and entertaining repertoire he presented various subjects, such as architecture, or readings of his own poetry. Avant-garde soloists and bands from Riga improvised on stage. Important for the experience were the visual effects and use of multimedia, which featured slide projections with texts and photographs and special stage and room decorations.
The discos signaled Lediņš’s movement towards sound and multimedia experiments and his creation of the Restoration Workshop of Unfelt Feelings, one of the most interesting phenomena in avant-garde art in 1980s Latvia.
Date: Late 1970s–early 1980s
Organizer: Hardijs Lediņš
Location: “Oktobris”, the Construction Workers’ House of Culture, Riga