Danila Tkachenko

The Project “Lost Horizon” visualises the utopia of constructing the ideal world. Or rather, half-forgotten traces and ruins of this utopia: the Soviet architecture and technical buildings, which symbolically affirmed the technical progress and advance of the communist future.

I make photos of these objects, built by Soviet authorities, by the medium format camera 6x6, during the night and with a powerful light source. Thus I enclose them in a suprematist figure of the black square which refers to the “Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich, the early Russian avant-garde and the origins of the Soviet utopia.

The radical refusal of the old, and the belief in the beginning of the new, ideal cosmic life, devoted to the liberated human, unifies the aesthetic project of the Russian avant-garde and the political project of the Soviet power. If the “Black Square” was the artistic embodiment of utopia, then the Soviet rule was its social implementation.

The time has brought back the original meaning of utopia: u-topos is the absent place, place of nowhere. Presently, USSR is the utopia in its most strict sense.