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Russia


2000

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Russia
2000

City of Stars

“Give me your hand, dear reader, and let’s cover some ground together. It’s the month of May, the weather is superb. The sky is a tender blue; young willow leaves glisten as if freshly washed…” Turgenev

Abstracts

"No, it’s not Turgenev who invites you on a jaunt across the immense Russian steppe, but the Romanian intellectual Andreï Ujika who takes you in his Lada on the road to Star City near Moscow. It’s the month of March, the weather is rotten. The sky is grey, streaked with heavy snowflakes. The concrete blocks in Moscow’s endless suburbs have gradually thinned, giving way to a forest of birch trees, dark as night. I’ve just spent two hours at a police station. I was picked up for photographing one of those impressive concrete blocks. It was finally decided that it was no longer forbidden for foreigners to photograph the said blocks.

(...) Star City, the temple of high technology, is vaguely suggestive of a rundown provincial cultural center except in a more massive form. Flurries of snow get mixed up with the disjointed metallic structure. Patches of the 1950s linoleum floor are peeling off. In the toilets, buckets replace flushes. (…) But once I get over this first impression of decay, Star City stirs the same feeling in me as Moscow did when I discovered it upon my arrival: an emanation of indestructible power. In Moscow, the avenues are wider; the constructions all seem monumental, anchored deep in the ground. Even the sweetest of dachas is sculpted from heavy wood. I felt unsettled by this encounter of a different kind with an invincible people."

Extract from Carnets de voyage 2, 2000, Éditions Gallimard

Works

Russia 3390
Serguei Krikalev, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 33 cm

Russia 3394
Centrifugeuse, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 66 cm

Russia 3412
Rue de Moscou, 2000

Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 66 cm

Russia 3392
Alla Svellozerova, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 33 cm

Russia 3396
Irina Kondreïtiva, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Acrylic on paper
42 x 66 cm

Russia 3400
Le vieux Igor Nevzorov, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 33 cm

Russia 3404
Luba Kasianova, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 33 cm

Russia 3406
Moscou et l'Eglise St Nicolas, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Gouache on paper
42 x 66 cm

Russia 3398
La Maison de Tolstoï, 2000

Moscow, Russia
Acrylic on paper
42 x 66 cm

Books

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