Curator Selection / 2021 / /

Return of the Repressed

After 45 years, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving broken countries throughout Eastern Europe. Deserted industrial, military and residential buildings dropped out of coded urban space. With nobody monitoring them, they were repurposed as dump-sites, squats or even motorbike racetracks, filled with mounds of rubbish, plastic waste, and old rubber tyres. Nature reclaims these derelict sites by overgrowing the litter, pushing trees up through rain-rotted roof timbers, and creating new habitats in unnatural places. In the end, nature will win through the gradual erasure of all that happened here.