Translated material
Colta.ru
This year, Colta.ru decided to go to the experiment and invited to temporary curators over the section “Photo projects” of young and talented representatives of leading Russian photocurium. We divided the calendar year between six curators and asked them to select the most interesting samples of modern Russian photography for publication.
Invited curators
Katerina Zueva , center of photography named after Brothers Lumier
Nadezhda Sheremetova , "Femicip"
Sergey Lostev , "House of Metenkov"
Daria Tuminas , Freelance Curator, Amsterdam
Anastasia Bogomolova , The Blog This a Photobook
Svetlana Taylor , British Higher School of Design
Third resident: Sergey Lostev. Documentary photographer , curator of the photographic museum "Metenkov House" and the Cultural Transit Foundation . Lives and works in Yekaterinburg.
In 2013 and 2014, one of the curators of a photographic educational laboratory as part of the DNA-Pervouralsk project.
Works with documentary photography and various practices of contemporary art.
Sergey Lostev about Anastasia Bogomolova
The Urals come. More and more photographers are working on topics that represent the region, telling about it at the level of feelings. I work in a large photographic institution in the Urals, the purpose of which is including the support of young authors. My colleagues and I try to hold your hand on the pulse of what is happening not only in Yekaterinburg, but also in neighboring cities. Today we will talk about Nastya Bogomolova from Chelyabinsk, which will also be an invited curator at Colta.ru a little later. But below we will talk about Nastya as an artist. I will not make a long entry on the photographs, the author himself perfectly coped with this. A special bonus is the documentation of one of its performances to this project.
Anastasia Bogomolova
Three rows of first -graders. Girls - in festive bows and white aprons, boys - with ties. Next to me in school photography - several guys, whose German surnames I then transfer with mistakes to the back of the card - to remember. When in the 1990s the families of some classmates, whose fathers and mothers were the colleagues of my parents in a military town in the north of Kazakhstan, began to gather in Germany, I wondered: why they say that they return to their homeland? All my childhood, before my own departure to Russia, passed surrounded by the Germans, but I have never wondered how it happened that we grew up side by side.
I don’t remember when I first heard about Bakalstroy-Chelyabmetallurgstroy (briefly-bakallage) in the territory of the Metallurgical District of Chelyabinsk, but, in essence, this knowledge also came to why the back side of my archival photographs was listed-the names of the descendants of the Germans, deported during and after the war on and after the war. The Urals, to Siberia, on Altai, to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, where since 1942 they were collected in labor columns and sent to ITL. In the circumstances of wartime, such camps from points for convicts turned into places of conclusion of free citizens - representatives of those nations who fought on the side of the Nazi coalition. Italians, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, but mainly Germans, immigrants mainly from the Volga region, where their ancestors were invited by official manifestos under Catherine II, were declared potential saboteurs and spies.
Mobilized for the construction of roads, housing and factories that are today components of the main industrial potential of the city, in Chelyabinsk, the Bakelag prisoners, 86% filled with Soviet Germans, often worked without projects and estimates. Daytime feeding - 400-600 grams of bread, millet porridge on the water in the morning, a bald from a rotten silage of a forest nettle to lunch and in the evening, a bitter infusion of pine needles. Of the clothes - a fufaika and boots sewn from old auto -wings. The easiest job is a stone quarry, the most difficult area is the logging. Any manifestation of dissatisfaction with the conditions of detention, even verbal, was perceived as clearly pro -fascist and could threaten responsibility until the execution - until the summer of 1943, the Chelyabinsk camp accounted for 58% of all German prisoners sentenced to death contained in the Urals. Dying from exhaustion and diseases, the prisoners gained the last shelter in the nemarkized mass graves behind the slag -oxide of metallurgical production.
After seventy years, the events associated with the bakallag have practically no reflection in the modern landscape of the city, and the Germans-trudders, like thousands of other repressed citizens, remained not only beyond the post-war heroization of the rear drummers, but also on the periphery of commemorative processes until the 1950s.
Collective memory does not tolerate ambiguity. It is easier and more convenient for her to reduce events to mythical archetypes. And the traumatic experience of tens of thousands of people is forced to overcome both the reluctance of society to listen to it and the heroic stereotypes of society. In Chelyabinsk, as in many other places of former ITLs scattered around the country, the memory of the survivors and the memory of the dead is fixed in rare formal memorial objects. However, they are to the same extent that the transformed territories of the Balaklaga with the buildings and outlines of the former camp that were still preserved in some places (the boundaries of its three sections coincide with the current colonies) are deprived of that symbolic aura of memory that would point out the past and comprehend it. They are just a continuation of general oblivion. And oblivion does not have a healing force for historical injuries.
"Fourth norm": documentation of the interrupted performance (video, 16:20)
January 4, 2016, -19 ° C. Stone quarry. Metallurgical district of Chelyabinsk. The execution time is about two hours.
When I was on the ice that covered the stone quarry, which during the years of the Bakallag was one of the working areas for prisoners, I hoped to fulfill my own labor norm, bypassing this place around the perimeter and gradually approaching the center. I fell into the water several times, soaked my legs, broke my shoes. She withstood only eight circles. The latter walked almost in socks in the snow. In the end she stopped - and fell into a snowdrift. Eight circles. About a quarter of the norm. According to the rules of the camp for this, no more than 400 g of bread would be supposed to. While sitting in my career, I thought: such a finale of a failed performance is a result? As soon as she got up, a couple of fishermen came out onto the ice, immediately crossed out of their tracks all my circles of memory, my one -year rings.