Eyewitness of the invisible – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Vienna Kunsthaus Hundertwasser Museum hosts the exhibition “Invisible Places” – the first retrospective of the Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer in Austria, it shows images from his main series, which also exist in the form of photo books. Some of the “invisible places” were filmed in Russia, but the photograph of Siler will be of interest to the domestic audience not only for this reason.
It seems that the most famous photo series and photo book by Gregor Sailer is “Potemkin Villages” (2015–2017). The birthplace of the title expression is represented by only two groups of photographs: one shows dilapidated huts in Suzdal, covered with photo banners with carved platbands and other beauty, and the banners are also already dilapidated; on the other – some kind of administrative and office construction in Ufa, wrapped in photo banners from all the facades, the skeleton of the building is visible in the banner gaps. In general, you will not surprise anyone with such architectural decorations both in Russia and abroad, but Siler was told that this disguise arose before the arrival of President Putin. And individual details – pots of flowers, cats and curious old women are visible in the painted windows of Suzdal huts, and the photographic continuous glazing of the Ufa high-rise building reflects the blue sky in light clouds – seem to confirm the veracity of this version (I wonder if the Ufa decorators guessed with the weather that, if it rained during the visit?). If this is indeed the case, as the photographer claims, then, of course, we can be proud of the inviolability of historical traditions.
The remaining plots of “Potemkin Villages” are not related to Russia and lead away from the original meaning of the phrase. Siler took a lot of pictures in the “copytowns” of China, reproducing European cities, and these photographs are striking in their sparseness, the very fact of which says a lot about the features of Chinese capitalism hidden from a superficial observer. The plywood town in Sweden, a testing ground for automobiles, looks very impressive: for some reason, the designers decided to design plywood facades along the roads in the style of one-story America, so that Swedish test drivers have to cut circles in a fictitious overseas suburbia. However, most of the pictures were taken at military training grounds – in the USA, France, Germany, and all the concrete objects on them are the ghosts of some urban spaces. In Taryn Simon’s “American Catalog of the Hidden and Unknown” there was one photograph of the “world church of God” from the Kentucky test site, a universal religious building – either a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue – where hostage rescue techniques are practiced. With Siler, we see entire training cities for military exercises – blocks, streets, squares, and if an American city in the middle of the Mojave Desert has a distinctly Middle Eastern character, then the cities of the French and German training grounds resemble something European. The fact that cities today have become the main theater of military operations belongs to the field of common knowledge, but even reports cannot reconcile with the idea that this spectacle is being played out not somewhere in Asia, but right next to it, in Europe. recent news.
If you follow the formal genre definitions, then everything Siler shoots refers to architectural photography, and for almost twenty years of his creative activity he has collected an impressive collection of prizes in this area. However, a certain focus makes his entire architectural photography a single conceptual project with clear political overtones. Sailer was born in Schwaz, Tyrol, but did not study in Austria, but in Germany, in Dortmund, which, like the entire Ruhr region, was greatly influenced by the Dusseldorf school of Bernd and Hilla Becher. He has all the advantages of this West German style: coldness, detachment, analytical vision, serial thinking, large picture format – the architectural object has been studied with a research eye and included in some kind of typology. He shot his first series, dedicated to the Hansa coking plant complex, the famous industrial monument in Dortmund, while still a student – it was a project quite in the Becherian spirit. In the next student work, Sailer seemed to continue to develop Becher’s thematic field – to study the industrial heritage of the Ruhr basin, but, immersed in the material, he found his own special topic.
The photographic study, with the sci-fi title “Subraum” (hyperspace, literally – subspace), dealt with the underground architecture of the Ruhr: a metro line under construction in Bochum, archive storages in Düsseldorf and libraries in Dortmund, a bunker for civilians in Duisburg – get into these dungeons It is practically impossible for an outsider, so there is a certain amount of student romance and adventurism in the suite. But given the role played by the Ruhr in the last world war, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that any of the underground infrastructure shown here has a defensive value. The series “The Box” (2014-2015) also echoes the past war, the title of which is the translation into English of the word “box”, which denoted secret defense enterprises in Soviet Newspeak. Siler managed to get into the dungeons of the secret Messerschmitt factory, located in abandoned silver mines near his native Schwaz. Invisible cave architecture turns out to be an unimaginable historical and industrial palimpsest: in the 15th century, silver mining made Schwaz the second largest and richest city in that part of Europe that today is called Austria, and in the middle of the 20th century this relic of medieval industry first became a giant concentration camp factory of the Third Reich, where prisoners worked, and then – a prison in the French occupation zone, where Nazi criminals were kept. And yet the main architectural series of Sailer are devoted not to past, but to future wars.
While working on the Closed Cities project (2009–2012), Siler penetrated into such oases of modern urban planning that you will not find in textbooks on urban studies and which are completely unhappy with the arrival of a photographer. Showcases of documents are displayed next to the front color photographs: endless correspondence with local authorities to obtain permission to shoot, clippings from newspapers and magazines with articles about the degree of freedom of speech at the destination, maps, diaries, photographs of expedition members – all this office is far from student romance of the first cycles of Sailer. As in Potemkin Villages, there is no one strict principle for building a typology in Closed Cities: these can be refugee camps on the border of Algeria and Western Sahara or Nordelta, the largest and richest gated community in Latin America, but most of the forbidden territories are places of extraction of natural resources, whether it be the Yakutian Mirny, the diamond capital of Russia, the Qatari Ras Laffan, the largest gas field in the world, or the Chilean Chuquicamata, a city gobbled up by the world’s largest copper ore quarry. Siler captures both the mines themselves and those that have grown up around the settlements of the miners of one or another basis of national wealth – the contrast between natural wealth and social poverty is striking, as is the contrast between the steel wagons for refugees in the Sahara and the villas of the Norddelta.
Sailer’s latest project, The Polar Silk Road (2017-2021), is dedicated to the Arctic: Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Norway, Great Britain – surreal snowy landscapes, surreal architectural objects mainly for military purposes. In addition to bureaucratic difficulties with all the permits and permits, the use of analog photographic equipment in conditions of 55-degree frost turned out to be a particularly difficult task. This is a fundamental position: Gregor Siler does not work with digital – all his “object-oriented” shooting was done with analog cameras, to which, in photographic mythology, greater objectivity is attributed than in digital technologies. And this objective photograph with all objectivity tells us that all the architecture of the Earth, invisible to the civilian population, from the training ground in the Mojave Desert to the Mir quarry, is the architecture of war, past, present or future.
Unseen Places. Gregor Sailer. Vienna, Hundertwasser Museum, until 19 February
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