Dachnaya and other territories of Kiyevskaya railway stations
In 2011 Moscow city (Russia) was expanded by 2.4 times, this government project was called “New Moscow” or “Big Moscow”. To southwest along Kiyevskaya railway, the ex suburban areas about 1,500 square km. goes under city exploration and urban expansion, forming a new landscape.
Documentation of “New” Moscow territories. Exploration of typology and utility of post soviet places, there interlacement and integration at new landscapes. In specially distant and deadpan manner. Daily routine, transit spaces, casual landscapes and “Non places” in Marc Auge meaning.
Neutral: In most of these landscape shots, there is no familiar beauty, but rather a desire to aestheticize space as a landscape. I deliberately separate the concepts of landscape and space and continue to pay attention to the most unsightly parts of the scene, which in a normal situation we strive to change as quickly as possible. Inspiring by Ed Ruscha’s Gasolines project at the stage of getting started to work I was thinking if landscape outside the train window can be compared to floating scenery, then these pictures take us inside the scene, static, dead and boring, they allow to study themselves due to the temporal nature of photography medium. In many ways, asking the questions “why is this landscape exactly like that?”, “what kind of people formed it?”, “did they like this environment?” or often used in Russia “Who is to blame and what to do?” with all these questions, I come to the moment of identifying the individuals who shaped this landscape. This is essentially a visual anthropological exploration.
Exoticless: For all our striving for “detachment”, we inevitably come across certain “expectations” in the consumption of those or that cultural product. And here, in a consistent fixation, I strove for the least exoticisation of the landscape, as a part of the post-Soviet space. Presenting an internal review, first of all, for one’s own consumption, without looking back at the Western audience and the usual approach, which boils down to exoticizing distant frontiers.
