For her photo series Of Time and Memory, Bulgarian photographer Eugenia Maximova documented homes in Russia, Ukraine and Moldova that still encompass a Soviet style. In these rooms we encounter clocks, calendars and personal archives — various marks of time — but it is her own memories that Maximova projects onto these interiors. “While I was taking pictures for my project, a lot of memories from my childhood resurfaced,” says Maximova. Although the photographer grew up in Bulgaria, she recognised the kitschy household items that were mass produced in the Soviet Union as copies of western luxury goods but were common elsewhere in the world. “At home we had many low-value objects, cutlery, glasses, and ornaments that we handled with great care.” Soviet memorabilia that characterises these rooms reveals a nostalgia for the past. Yet Maximova presents it as a collective memory, not only shared by former Soviet countries. Rather than estrange the viewer, these images make you feel at home. This is why kitsch, although sometimes strange, is timeless and appealing.
27 November 2018
The Calvert Journal: Elena Subach & Viacheslav Poliakov
Ukrainian photographers Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov have been working together since 2012. Their City of Gardens focuses on the Polish city of Katowice, once an important region for coal mining and industrial steel production. Today, Katowice has been rebranded a “city of gardens” following a transformation aimed at the cultural development of the region. Situated within the historic Silesia region, most of which lies along south-west Poland’s Oder River, Katowice retains a strong sense of local identity and tradition. Against a backdrop of globalisation and fears of an increasing consumerist uniformity, City of Gardens reflects a search for a unique Polish aesthetic that lies on the border between East and West. [...]
Elena: I get my inspiration from stories. If a place or an event has a story attached to it that people want to tell, or that people can listen to until they forget what they were talking about in the first place — that’s how you know it might work for a project. We chose Silesia, where we shot our Polish project, because of the wonderful stories our friend told about it. She spent her childhood there and was able to convince us that not only was it where Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain, even the doves were a brighter shade of white there. [...]
Elena: On the whole, social networks have totally devalued image-making. And that’s an important step, because now you really have to ask yourself what you’re doing and why. They are also an invaluable educational resource for those who don’t live in big cities: if it wasn’t for the internet, we never would have discovered the photography we love, or not to this extent.
America Magazine: Why are so many people fleeing Honduras?
Honduras has endured years of economic and political crises. The November 2017 election results, endorsed by the U.S. government but widely perceived as fraudulent, led to mass protests and dozens of deaths of demonstrators at the hands of security forces and police. The U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights reported that military police and army “used excessive force, including lethal force, to control and disperse protests, leading to the killing and wounding of protesters as well as passers-by.” [...]
Karla Rivas, the coordinator of the Jesuit Migration Network, spoke with America by phone from Queretaro, Mexico, where she was accompanying a separate caravan of mothers who were searching for their children—young migrants who had gone unaccounted for after heading north. “The humanitarian exodus [from Honduras] is the culmination of several crises that have been manifesting themselves over time with the implementation of an unjust economic model.” She called it “an inhumane economic model that is based on extracting [resources] from communities.”[...]
The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that Honduras has “the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America,” a inequity that has been accelerating since President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in 2009. In the two years after the coup, “over 100 percent of all real income gains went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans,” according to the report. [...]
Violence is another key driver of immigration from Honduras, which endures one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Much of the violence has been associated with drug trafficking and acts of extortion—criminal gangs can essentially control entire urban communities—but some of the violence results from collusion among gang members, police and security forces, sometimes in acts of intimidation directed at community or environmental activists.
Quartz: Putin picked a very Putin time to seize three Ukrainian ships
When Russian president Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, his approval ratings were at record lows and the world was watching the Sochi Olympics. When he went to war with Georgia in 2008, the world was consumed by the Beijing Olympics. [...]
On the back of controversial pension reforms, Putin’s ratings are again in a deep trough. In fact, they’re at the lowest point since 2014. After the seizure of Crimea, Putin’s ratings climbed dramatically and he rode extraordinary levels of support for four years.[...]
More conflict in the east is the last thing Europe needs. Among European countries, the UK is traditionally the most hawkish on Russia—but Brexit negotiations are at their busiest point in two years, consuming both Britain and the continent. Amid all that, Britain and Spain are having their own territorial dispute over Gibraltar. [...]
Now is a good time to mess with Ukrainian politics. It’s just four months until the 2019 election, and polls for president Petro Poroshenko—a Putin foe—are looking dire. The Kremlin is unlikely to be happy with whoever wins—former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, who has a long and bitter history with Russia, is in pole position at the moment.
Quartz: Taiwan’s vote against same-sex marriage illustrates the problem with referendums
The high court decision did not legalize same-sex marriage; it only declared that the legislature would have to make marriage equality law within two years. That meant it was up to Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which gained power in 2016, to follow through. It failed to do so. [...]
That is a low bar. Even though Christians make up just 5% of Taiwan’s population, they were able to collect the paltry 280,000 signatures needed to make their referendum happen. Their proposal to define marriage as “between a man and a woman” received over 7 million “yes” votes—more than a counter-referendum endorsing same-sex marriage, but far less than half of Taiwan’s over 18 million registered voters. [...]
The decision on marriage law in Taiwan reveals an even bigger problem with referendums, though: they turn politics into a popularity contest. Democracy is not just about voting, but also pluralism and the protection of minority rights. In deciding to call marriage discrimination unconstitutional, the court was acting to protect those rights for the LGBT community. Plus, given Taiwan’s law that a referendum needs only 25% of voters to say “yes,” it doesn’t even meet the standard of majority rule.
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