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