NOSTALGHIA (EKATERINBOURG) [2004]

25 photographs, C-Print

« Nostalgia isn’t just about looking to the past; it’s about feeling the present as already past and the future as over. » Serge Daney, “Exile in Nostalghia” (about the film Nosthalghia, by Andrei Tarkovsky), Libération, 1985

Named after Empress of Russia Catherine, Ekaterinburg (1723) was one of the theatres, real or symbolic, of Russian history in the 20th century. Shortly after the October Revolution, members of the imperial family were executed here; during the Stalin period, it was one of the administrative centers of the Gulag; from 1960 to 1990, in the Cold War context, it was a “closed city” (with regulated access, and closed to foreigners); in the 1990s, it was the scene of a bloody battle between mafia groups for political and economic control.

When this series of photographs was taken in 2004, at a time when the city was taking its development model from the great business centers of the West (“Ekat City” is today the striking result of this), all these layers of time were still visible: barely 15 years after the city opened, time seems to stand still. The passage through the nearby industrial town of Polevskoy,and even more so through the small village of Abramovo, completed the picture.