Urbanautica

Beyond the River
by Andrea Lazzaroni

portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Anthropology and Territories

I found myself in Transnistria by pure chance, after a train journey from Kyiv to Odesa. Originally bound for Chișinău airport and a flight home, I had a few days to spare, so I decided to visit Tiraspol, the capital, or more accurately, the self-declared capital of this breakaway republic. From the outset I was drawn to its peculiar atmosphere. In the years that followed I returned several times for brief summer visits, travelling the region from north to south and quietly documenting its landscapes. As its name suggests, literally “beyond the Dniester”, Transnistria is the strip of land on the left bank of the river, wedged between Moldova and Ukraine. In 1990 it declared independence from Chișinău, triggering a war in 1992. The conflict has remained frozen ever since. Relations between Chișinău and Tiraspol have gradually improved, thanks in part to European Union mediation, though the ongoing war in Ukraine has once again heightened tensions in the region. The majority of inhabitants are Russians, yet the region remains notably diverse, with many Ukrainians, Moldovans and Bulgarians living side by side. In the past, Jews, Armenians and Germans also formed significant parts of the population. Journalists and travellers often describe Transnistria as “a country that doesn’t exist.” The phrase has become a cliché, yet it captures something essential about the region’s ambiguous status. Compared to Moldova Transnistria has retained a more visible connection to the Soviet era. This persistence is evident in the urban planning and everyday surroundings: wide streets, apartment blocks, abundant green spaces, statues honouring Lenin, collective farmers and cosmonauts, houses of culture, mosaics, outdoor stalls selling kvass, railways and heavy industry; all set against sweeping yellow wheat and sunflower fields that stretch along the Dniester. Yet this connection is not only architectural; it carries an emotional weight for those who live there. Through this photographic essay, I seek to reveal the suspended scenery of this little-known corner of Europe, where traces of a vanished world linger quietly amid the rhythms of rural life.

Review by URBANAUTICA

Transnistria — literally, “beyond the Dniester” — suggests a condition of passage, a territory defined by its position on the other side of a boundary. A self-declared republic whose political status remains unresolved, Transnistria inhabits a peculiar temporal dimension, where the past has not entirely receded and the future remains difficult to imagine.

Andrea Lazzaroni approaches this landscape without the urgency of the correspondent or the explanatory ambition of the documentary survey. Returning repeatedly over several summers, he develops a quieter form of attention, allowing the region to emerge through the ordinary textures of its surroundings. Broad avenues, apartment blocks, monuments, mosaics and houses of culture coexist with railway lines, industrial structures and the expansive fields of wheat and sunflowers. These are not simply remnants of the Soviet era, preserved as historical curiosities or relics. They belong to a material vocabulary of a vanished political order that continues to shape everyday experience. What might appear elsewhere as an obsolete landscape remains here an intimate, inhabited reality.

There is a peculiar temporality in these scenes: a sense that something has ended without quite disappearing, and that something else is approaching without ever fully arriving. The photograph holds this interval open.
In Transnistria, the passage of time seems to have accumulated unevenly. Political history speaks of frozen conflicts and contested borders, yet the rhythms of rural life continue, indifferent to the need for a definitive historical narrative. Lazzaroni’s photographs invite us to look a territory that exists intensely in its own contradictions. This act of looking it's not intended to preserve these contradictions, but rather to invite viewers to consider the place of such territories in a world that seeks to standardise, regulate and orthopaedise everything, until little remains that resists classification. Photography becomes an act of attention towards what persists outside the dominant narrative of progress.

Beyond the River by Andrea Lazzaroni

Review by URBANAUTICA

Beyond the River
by Andrea Lazzaroni