Video
The film documents a performative event organized in December 2019 in Norilsk, Russia. Its central element was the guided bus tour around one of the streets of the city - Sevastopolskaya. In the 1940s Sevastopolskaya was designed and built up by the prisoners who were the main population of the Arctic camp-city. By the 1980s, a significant part of the original structures decayed and was demolished. The demolition provoked intense protest and debate among the Norilsk public, who still remember Sevastopolskaya’s houses and its atmosphere with nostalgia.
As in some of my other works here I try to provoke re-thinking of the present through research of the past and its activating. The project was disguised in habitual forms of getting-together (collective meal, guided tour in a bus) in order to defamiliarize the environment and question the act of nostalgic remembering.
Tatiana Efrussi
Artist and architecture historian. Currently based in Paris