"New Moscow" project reflects the changes occurring with the region in the South-West of Moscow, where I was born and grown.
In 2012 the territory of Moscow increased 2.5 times, swallowing up my hometown and smaller settlements around and found itself at the sixth place in the list of the largest cities in the world. Numerous neighborhoods of new buildings, similar each other like twins and towering over the small country houses, that were here before, have grown up to the South-West of the capital by the Kaluzhskoye and Kievskoye Highways.
The process of great transformation of the territory, the urban gold rush, was started and it changed residence registrations, postal codes, bus routes, the surrounding landscape and lifestyle of hundreds of thousands of new residents.
Being in the epicenter of such great transformations of landscape, I have discovered that this process slips out of focus of the usual perception that habitually catches much smaller alterations.
The attention to the environment is getting even weaker at common places, which you visit every day. As a result, the altering landscapes captured subconsciously are getting accumulated, periodically invoking a feeling of deja vu and disorientation.
Moving away from the systematic fixing city-building works, I am concentrating on this half-conscious experience, and creating the project like REM sleep, in which the images that were accumulated during the day, pop up and get mixed revealing some hidden, irrational connections. In this way (Through the lens or From this angle of view) the territory of New Moscow is appeared to be a space where the orderliness of planned urbanization is confronted with the chaos and confusion of the ordinary existence. Following routine routes to the nearest metro stations, passing by new buildings and overcrowded parking lots, parks and summer residens, I use a large-format 4x5" camera to record my own impressions regarding the changes of such a familiar to me landscape into the collective memory about the Great Construction.
