Vapno (Lime)

Note: This photographic project is a book of 224 pages. I find removing photos from their spreads damaging to the story, so adding full spreads instead of single photos to this application. This book captures a slow natural decay of the UkSSR (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) — a strange country inscribed in my birth certificate but erased from modern language. I have never heard anyone say they were born in the UkSSR, even though my generation was born there. This book is about covering painful past with a white paint. About the reclamation of Soviet ruins by post-Soviet people, about lime, silicate bricks, and foam concrete. Most of the photographs were taken in 2016–17, a time when it still seemed possible to simply paint over the rusty legacy of the past. “The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to speak, to remind, to teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.” Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason