At first there was the Russian Empire, with Saint Petersburg’s splendor, and the dynasties of nobles far and distant, scattered across an unlimited country. Later came communism’s turn, with its pyramidal hierarchy, its ideology imposed without any discussion for a “superior common good”—an ideology that revealed itself to be 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. One dictatorship replaced by another, one that is even worse.
Therefore time passed over counts and masters, hierarchies 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 lasts long, men and women living suspended in a time-space different from 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 becomes a habit. The regions of the Caucasus.
The Caucasus is a concentration of stereotypes as well as surprises. For centuries it has been a land of political, religious, military and expansionistic rivalry, cruel struggle between opposing states and also between allied states. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century this region has been part of Russia—first under the tsarist Russian Empire, later absorbed by the Soviet Bloc.
Thanks to the radical transformations of 1991—involving the entire Warsaw Pact coalition—and the storm caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, new and ancient disputes resurfaced in the region, and in some cases worsened, with a revival of political and economic aims for supremacy in the area.
This project takes into account the countries in which disputes and struggles are not yet over or only seem to be over, burning like intermittent fires under the political rhetoric of “normalization” and “pacification.” In 2008 I began to investigate the daily life of people living in the Northern Caucasus, who are still divided between the claim for independence and the pride for their diversity; economic subordination; the historical-political and mental affiliations with Russia; condemned to an eternal geographic position in an oblivion, the elaboration of a new post-Soviet identity.
