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Categories / Documentary Reportage /Tags / Abkhazia / Asia / Caucasus / Chechnya / conflict / Daghestan / daily life / documentary photography / ethnic cleansing / ethnicity / Ingushetia / Islam / religion / South Ossetia / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / Comments Off

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At first there was the Russian Empire, Saint Petersburg’s splendour, nobles’ dynasties set against commons far and distant, scattered on an unlimited country. Later on came communism’s turn, with its pyramidal hierarchy, its ideology imposed without any discussion for a “superior common good” that revealed itself utopian and elusive. Walls and curtains finally fell down, but renewal’s winds were broken off by the chill of something more indefinite and creeping. Something nobody talks about, but nobody can dispute. A dictatorship replaced by another, worst.

Therefore time passed over counts and masters, hierarchs and politicians, arms of the law and armed arms. And all the past reflects itself in people’s eyes. A population that becomes silent and fierce, strong and proud, persons for whom an endearment never last long, family’s ceremonial is reduced to the least, men and women live suspended in a time space different from that one of the rest of the world. Places where blood has flown too much, where too often it is forbidden to mourn one’s own dead, where screams become mute, and hiding turned into habit. Caucasus’ regions.

This project takes into account the countries in which disputes and struggles are not over yet or only apparently seem concluded, as intermittent fires under the political rhetoric of “normalization” and “pacification”. I began to investigate the daily life of people living in the Russian Caucasus, who are still divided between the claim for independence and the pride for their diversity, economic subordination, the historical-political and mental affiliation, condemned to an eternal geographic position in an oblivion, the elaboration of a new post-soviet identity.

I’ve been working from Chechnya to Dagestan, from Northern to Southern Ossetia (just after the 2008’s war), all the way to Abkhazia, crossing geographical and political borders. My interest is to carry on a considered path, making notes on the tracks left by the mother land. My aim is to complete, republic after republic, the region’s exploration, unifying it through an imaginary yarn that is partly already appeared.