The
Artist
Filips Smits
Lives and Works in
Riga
Filips Smits (b. 1996, Rīga) is a Latvian visual artist working with analogue
photography, staged scenarios, and interventions in public space. His practice
explores how urban environments and light shape bodily experience, social rituals,
and forms of togetherness, reframing everyday reality through a surreal and poetic
lens. Influenced by Situationist psychogeography and the dérive, Smits approaches
the city as a living organism structured by visible architecture and hidden social codes.
He is a nominee for the Latvian Annual Art Award and the recipient of the FK Prize for
Best Young Latvian Photographer. His central long-term project, Let’s Get Sun-Kissed,
investigates rest, presence, and rituals of renewal in the Baltic context, shaped by
northern light, short summers, and post-Soviet urban landscapes. Through
collaborative, carefully staged photographic situations, Smits examines how moments
of stillness can quietly challenge behavioral norms and reimagine public space as a
site of intimacy, vulnerability, and collective experience.
Projects
2026
Let’s Get Sun-kissed
Let’s Get Sun-Kissed is an analogue photography project composed of staged interventions in urban environments across the Baltic states. Set in
post-Soviet housing blocks, peripheral courtyards, rooftops, and improvised “recreation zones,” the series explores how everyday acts of stillness—
resting, sunbathing, pausing—can quietly challenge the logic of spaces designed for movement, control, and visibility.
The project investigates the politics of public presence. A body at rest in the wrong place becomes a subtle disruption, prompting questions about
who can occupy space without purpose, who is visible, and how urban environments shape behavioural norms. The sun functions as both a
biological need and a cultural ritual—desired, unevenly accessible, and quietly claimed.
Drawing on Situationist psychogeography and the dérive, the work constructs semi-fictional scenes in collaboration with stylists, set designers,
actors, and location specialists. Each image hovers between documentation and performance, where the visual language of fashion, theatre, and
conceptual photography intersect.
Through surreal gestures and soft displacements, the project reframes the everyday city as a space of potential—where pleasure, intimacy, and
presence can momentarily interrupt the pace of urban life. It invites viewers to reconsider public space not as purely functional, but as a contested
and emotionally charged landscape.
As an evolving body of work, Let’s Get Sun-Kissed continues to uncover new sites where sunlight, selfhood, and collective leisure converge—
temporary sanctuaries that imagine alternate ways of being together in the city.
2026
Let’s Get Sun-kissed
Let’s Get Sun-Kissed is an analogue photography project composed of staged interventions in urban environments across the Baltic states. Set in
post-Soviet housing blocks, peripheral courtyards, rooftops, and improvised “recreation zones,” the series explores how everyday acts of stillness—
resting, sunbathing, pausing—can quietly challenge the logic of spaces designed for movement, control, and visibility.
The project investigates the politics of public presence. A body at rest in the wrong place becomes a subtle disruption, prompting questions about
who can occupy space without purpose, who is visible, and how urban environments shape behavioural norms. The sun functions as both a
biological need and a cultural ritual—desired, unevenly accessible, and quietly claimed.
Drawing on Situationist psychogeography and the dérive, the work constructs semi-fictional scenes in collaboration with stylists, set designers,
actors, and location specialists. Each image hovers between documentation and performance, where the visual language of fashion, theatre, and
conceptual photography intersect.
Through surreal gestures and soft displacements, the project reframes the everyday city as a space of potential—where pleasure, intimacy, and
presence can momentarily interrupt the pace of urban life. It invites viewers to reconsider public space not as purely functional, but as a contested
and emotionally charged landscape.
As an evolving body of work, Let’s Get Sun-Kissed continues to uncover new sites where sunlight, selfhood, and collective leisure converge—
temporary sanctuaries that imagine alternate ways of being together in the city.
Filips Smits
ISSP
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
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