Loving Earth - PBF01 / Danila Tkachenko
18 November 2016 - 18 January 2017
“What was it? A fallen meteorite? Visit of dwellers of space abyss?”
The project « Restricted Areas » is about the human impulse towards utopia, about our striving for perfection through technological progress.
Humans are always trying to own ever more than they have—this is the source of technical development. The by-products of this progress are various commodities, as well as the tools of violence to hold power over others. Better, higher, stronger—these ideals often express the central ideology of governments. To achieve these standards, governments are ready to sacrifice almost everything. Meanwhile, the individual is supposed to become a tool for reaching these goals. In exchange, the individual is promised a higher level of comfort. « For Restricted Areas, I traveled in search of places that used to hold great importance for the idea of technological progress. These places are now deserted. They have lost their significance, along with their utopian ideology, which is now obsolete ». Many of these places were once secret cities that did not appear on any maps or public records. These places were the sites of forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came! Any progress comes to an end sooner or later; this can happen for different reasons—nuclear war, economic crisis, natural disaster. What’s interesting for me is to witness what remains after the progress has ground to a halt.
Nowadays, there are lots of rumors about what could mean disaster for this civilization. One way or another, nobody knows the precise answer to this question. I may only suppose that the inhabitants have finally lost control over the development of technology, and the ecological equilibrium was disturbed. Nature was destroyed. Industrial waste, residues from insane and desperate experiments in an attempt to balance out the condition have contaminated the planet to such an extent that its population, stricken by the whole complex of genetic illnesses, was doomed to barbarism and inevitable extinction. However, I don’t know; I don’t know, there could be an infinite number of reasons, just remember that story of the flooded planet… In any case, we only deal now with the remnants of incomprehensible structures and devices, by which we can reconstruct only a rough portrait of the inhabitants and can only guess the causes of this tragedy.”
