The project “Landscapes of Nizhniy Novgorod” came as a result of my residency in the Volga Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia. A series of research residencies was established to develop new, contemporary knowledge about the city. The project  was developed in collaboration with local sociologist Olga Chernyavskaya.  It was aimed at exploring the identity of Nizhniy Novgorod, through tracing the distinctive features of its eight districts.
 
In order to do that, we decided to organise eight walks, each one dedicated to a particular district. These walks were organised as field studies, though they carried elements of the situationists’ dérives. That is to say, that walks were designed to document the city and gather “the field data”, but also create a situation where new and unintended encounters could take place. 
 
The project was also aimed at giving a voice to those parts of Nizhniy Novgorod that would be otherwise  considered to be too “banal” or “not interesting enough” to be photographed/presented. 
 
PART 1. THE ART OF WALKING AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL GAZE
The usage of walk as an artistic medium is by no means new. As David Evans, an author of comprehensive guide book on the art of walking mentions, walks were widely used by artists already in the beginning of the 20th century, when “traversing a city street on foot was treated by every major avant-garde group as a form of creative activity”. For a certain period performative activities such as walks, were forgotten but then rediscovered again in the second half of the twentieth century in the light of the philosophy of situationism and psychogeography. In recent years with the rise of “relational aesthetics” as one of the main discourses in contemporary art walks are now regarded as an element of artistic practice in the field of inter-human relations. The growing number of publications exploring and contextualising “artistic walks” (see for example David Evan’s monograph “The Art of Walking: A Field Guide” already mentioned above or The Lost  Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson) just proves the rising popularity of the walk as an artistic medium. 
 
Landscape as a picture and landscape being pictured 
 
The landscape came into history of painting mostly as a painting of a cultivated land, and this position immediately defines the viewer’s relation to nature. Nature is perceived mostly as an object. The viewers are situated out of the landscape. They are at least observers,  but sometimes also owners of the object. Perhaps, that is why the landscapes were ordered to be painted by landowners not only as a decoration of the sitting room, not only to emphasise the social position and the prosperity of the owner, but also as proof for the ownership of the land. In European painting tradition landscapes were not just beautiful pictures with the stunning views, but also, to a certain extent, political manifestos.
In this project landscape is addressed both in terms of the painting tradition (I mean addressed not in terms of the following tradition, but rather in appropriating its forms and discourses for critical reflection) and as a social construct changing and defining itself all the time.  As an artist I appear to be confined between these two poles of the landscape. 
It was in the beginning of the 20th century when cities started to be described as landscapes, and today the “city landscape”, as a combination of words, is not questioned. At the end, what is the city if not a cultivated land. Walter Benjamin, describing the figure of the “flâneur”, a city slacker and a researcher under one hat,  says that the city “opens up for him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room”.  
Despite having a camera, I am partly a “flâneuse” as well, spending hours strolling in the city. And it is exactly by taking the position of the “flâneuse” I am able to combine two different poles of the landscape. When photographing a city, I also photograph an invisible image of myself on the other side of a camera, and the traces of the presence of a man are also my traces. Long walks turn myself from the observer into the participant.
PART 2. BORDER LAND
 
Part 3. Nations are based as much on what the people jointly forget,
as what they remember
Ernest Renan, 1882
Part 4. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
PART 5. THE RUINS OF THE EMPIRE
PART 6. SHAKESPEARE STREET.
PART 7. THE ENCOUNTERS
Part 8Ruins embody a set of temporal and historical paradoxes. The ruined building is a remnant of, and portal into, the past. Its decay is a concrete reminder of the passage of time. And yet by definition it survives, after a fashion: there must be a certain (perhaps indeterminate) amount of built structure still standing for us to refer to its as a ruin and not merely as a heap of rubble. At the same time, the ruin casts us forward in time. It predicts a future in which our present will slump into similar disrepair or fall victim to some unforeseeable calamity.
Brian Dillon, Ruins
Part 9. The City of Consumption
Part 10. Archaeology: Traces of Man
PART 11. IN AND OUT
 
This project was done during my residency in The National Center for Contemporary Arts (Volga region branch) in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia. I am very grateful to the sociologist Olga Chernyavskaya with whom I worked in pair to deliver this project  and to the curator of the project Alexander Kuridzen for their help and support. 
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