This project contains small cutouts from the 1960-80s
Soviet picture postcards zoomed in several times. One image
constitutes from 1 to 5 per cent of the original photograph. People
and scenes of daily life have been captured by the photographers
haphazardly, just as elements of composition. It needs to be said
that the Soviet picture postcards, printed in the millions, served
as a tacit mass propaganda tool to highlight the achievements of
Soviet urban planning and development, in which citizens, however,
were mere passive 'recipients' and 'observers' in the State
development project. Zoomed in and decontextualized, these
'elements' seem to come to the foreground though do not reveal any
'hidden truth', rather pointing to an imagination effort that's
required to peer into the past and try to capture its vague and
elusive image. A zine titled with a hard-to-translate zen-like
phrase coined by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 and meaning something
like "What We Do is What We'll Have, and How We'll Live" was
self-published in late 2019, a video flip-through can be watched
here
1500 RUB / 16 EUR / 19$ plus shipping
44 pages; Size 22x32 cm; Digital offset
printing
Published by recurrentBooks in 2019
Edition 20