Home (working title)
Gaston Bachelard wrote in his Poetics of space that "a home is one of the most powerful forces that integrate human thoughts, memories and dreams. If it had not been for home, people would fall into pieces. Home is our support in bad weather and storms everyday. Home is body and soul. It is the start of everything."
In 2013-2014 I started a collaboration with an architectural photographer Olga Alexeyenko. Together we are looking at the notions of home and shelter in an actively expanding urban environment of the largest Russian cities, where the number of buildings keep growing and at the same time old buildings that have lost their original function are often abandoned, ignored and are left to gradually ruin with no one looking after them. Places that other people created long ago with much care are now being misused, squatted, looted and wrecked. Ruins are often considered beautiful in the contemporary world - with fashion stories, adverts and films being shot inside. We like to look at ruins because we realize how happy we are this did not happen to us. Ruins may also be perceived as something invincible, some sort of entropy, the forces of nature. But in the urban environment where things are created and guided by men, where places are meant to shelter people for all sorts of different functions, it is not the case. The not-caring aspect becomes almost a violent act on the part of the government when one observes how many places like this exist. A manmade place with walls and a ceiling is always a home in a way, and homes must be taken care of. The ongoing project consists of a large amount of images shot between 2013 and now - Olga takes portraits of the places, and I take self-portraits and shoot details inside them. We want to realize the project in the form of a photobook.
The selection of 36 photos is built as a morning-till-night story with colors flowing through the photographs, a travel through places, going in and out, which will also be the principle for the book, and possibly an exhibition consisting of a total installation, including images, objects and light constructing together a place that viewers experience while walking through it.
