Last year the Ukrainian government banned any symbols, statues, flags, mosaics, imagery, anthems, street or city names affiliated with the Soviet Union. Over 900 Lenin statues have fallen across the country in the last three years in a phenomena known as Leninopad (“Lenin-fall”). Monuments to Lenin began to be removed mainly in the western parts of the country as early as the 1990s. Elsewhere, the statues survived until very recently, with the largest of Ukraine’s Lenins uprooted in Zaporozhia not two weeks ago. As easy it is to lose sense of what’s real when you witness historic events or conflicts on a screen, it’s also easy to forget about the physical debris left after such a symbolic gesture as the razing of a monument. The public indifference to what happened to the statues spurred Ackermann and Gobert to trace the whereabouts of the fallen leader.
“This project started out of curiosity. After the the statue of Lenin fell during Maidan, nobody cared what had become of it. For me it’s a very different visual and narrative work from the things I’m usually doing. Most of the work is done beforehand, behind the picture. Going to the location where the statue is, the only variables you have are the weather, the moment of the day, and the composition,” Ackermann explains. Working alongside, Gobert was crucial in researching where the monuments might be, and began also to document the stories of the people they met in the process. Combining images and first-person accounts, they are hoping to show the various perspectives to decommunisation. [...]
Statues are attacked for their association with power. Once fallen the monuments still find themselves in the midst of political struggles. As Gobert reflected: “Over the three days in Kharkiv we came to understand the balance of power in the city between the mayor and the governor and also between the activists who were united at the time of Maidan but are now fighting against each other. Looking for remnants of decommunisation, we found traces of corruption and a Soviet state of mind.”
No comments:
Post a Comment