PAVEL ROMANIKO

WORDS

The project "Nostalgia consists of large photographic prints, objects, and video projections. The project is ongoing reflection on the forced migration and inherent interdependency of collective and private. With this work I explore solidity of perceptions based on images and their impact on collective memory and forgetting. Employing methodologies of early propaganda, and relying on archives of existing images, both public and private, I revisit some of the more iconic, historically, and politically significant spaces and recreated them out of paper and chipboard and then later photographed to only exist as images.

In the moments of cultural turmoil, when concepts and perceptions of truth are questioned and manipulated at the highest levels, examples of some of the worst social experiments in human history should stand illuminated. The work Nostalgia was started in 2008 as reflection on such historical precedents. At that time the president Putin of Russia in a push to keep power increased his pressure on the country's remaining institutes of democracy, while maintaining the appearance of pseudo democratic state. Putin's grasp on power reminded of the porosity of monolithic concepts of freedom, truth and justice in still very young democratic state. Putin Russia's ruling elite seemed longingly keen on returning to the shores of its Soviet past, systematically and meticulously encroaching onto its own peoples' freedoms and liberties.

With the instinct of a constrictor snake, the state stifled the remaining free mass media, publishing industry, and any other dissent, and unleashed text-book propaganda to incite public opinion, both internally and abroad. The majority of the country, as if it were an unfortunate coma patient that had never fully regained consciousness, was returned to its life support—a collective euphoria of Soviet past grandeur. Echoing and even surpassing the magnitude of Soviet-day propaganda, leaflets, posters, radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines migrated to the digital walls of social media networks and high definition television screens, flooding them with disinformation and fake news. As a rule, propaganda relies on marginalizing the physicality of perception and false logic. It focuses one's attention on images as a primary source of interrogating the world, constantly reinforcing the collective euphoria. In that frenzy, one no longer acts, recollects, and forgets alone; one does all of these things as a whole—as a nation and as a fine-tuned collective body and mind that resides in one big communal apartment with a shared kitchen and bathroom.

The separate rooms of the collective and private are not connected by a corridor, as one may perceive. Neither do they seamlessly lead into each other or symbiotically interact. Quite on the contrary, the collective and private collapse onto one another, and weave into a single plane of fabric that if torn will rupture and expose the cogs and mechanisms of manipulation, orchestration and tyranny of the propaganda machines. In an attempt to pull apart some of this fabric, the images, objects, and videos that makeup Nostalgia put into question concepts of personal recollections and private spaces, comprising a schematic of personal bewilderment.