Lozhok

Lozhok is a place in the Siberian region, located 60km from Novosibirsk – the city where I was born. From 1929 to 1956, there was the camp with particularly strict regime OLP-4 – one of the most terrible points of the Gulag system. Over 27 years of the camp’s working, more than 30 thousand people died in this place. Prisoners worked in two limestone quarries without protective equipment – limestone dust killed a man on average for six months. The bodies were burned in furnaces at nearby brick factory or buried in nearby forests and fields. In the list of the prisoners were not only criminals, but also priests, people who have tried to escape from other camps, as well as political prisoners. Among the prisoners were men, women and children born in the camp. After the closure of the camp, the barracks in which the prisoners lived were destroyed. In their place in the 70s, the Palace of Culture, sports stadium, and a school were built. Underground sources filled one of the quarries, making it a lake. At its bottom there are still tractors and other equipment of that time. Another quarry is overgrown by vegetation. When I came here for the first time, I immediately felt the strong energy of this place. It was as if I went inside Tarkovsky's film “Stalker”, in the world after the catastrophe. I am interested in revealing the narratives contained within the local landscapes. The land here reveals itself as being both an agent of change and the field of human endeavour. Despite the attempts of time and people to disguise the traces of those terrible events – this place definitely remembers everything.