Vasily Pindyurin grew up in Soviet Russia. His series Patina exudes a sense of disorientation, of abandonment, of disillusionment, of loss. As well explained by his own words ... «My peers and I had Soviet cartoons, cinema, football, skates, bicycles, but what we really wanted were game consoles and video recorders. Then the country in which I was born stopped existing. The abundance of the capitalist world filled the space of the Soviet deficit. The cultures of the East and West leaked into each other with Snickers chocolate bars and Chinese Adidas fakes. 30 years later, video recorders and games consoles have been packed into the smartphone. I go to the magazine and buy “Soviet” things. I go out to flea markets and look in the cupboard and garages of acquaintances. In photographs, in the hands of young people, even those who did not live in the Soviet Union, these things turn into paradoxical objects. The objects that promise of a brighter future that will never arrive.»
How can we exorcise all this, framing this project in today's scenario of globalism, cited by Pindyurin? Setting aside the rhetoric of the global village and the risks resulting from the reduction of the citizen in a consumer (or even a consumer-actor that stages in commodified life), I would like to take the opportunity to recall another significant aspect. What appears in these images is the echo of a distant pain. As if we were in the presence of a crisis without a conflict.
That is, what we have witnessed for decades in the post-1989 climate (fall of the Berlin Wall) is a silent, diluted suffering. Deprived of historical references, and converted to a religion of fetishism, the individual appears at the mercy of an unaware destiny, or rather of an infinite present. A sort of massacre of the innocents, whose protagonists are above all adolescents. Those young people whose future is betrayed in favor of a castrating cosmopolitanism. Those portraits that Pindyurin well combines with vernacular and sterile perspectives.
We are once again forced to ask ourselves about the idea of humanity that underlies the so-called Western civilization. In the face of the extraordinary technological enhancement of action, moral prohibitions now have the same inhibiting force as bicycle brakes mounted on a jumbo jet. And furthermore, as we speak of photography, what level of empathy can we expect the images we produce to generate in the reader? A question that brings us back to the famous Chinese mandarin apologue, so much discussed by the French Enlightenment. How does our sensitivity work in the face of silent tragedies?
Therefore, the existential instability induced by the financial catechism that removes the historical foundations of civilization in favor of a blind wanderlust pushes us to consider the individual emptied of identity, as a victim of cultural genocide. What I read in these images and in the words of the author is the reference to the concept of Oros as defined by Aristotle in Politics. That material delimitation which defines the existential orography. That boundary that regulates the act of crossing the unknown, not to be confused with the concept of barrier that instead blinds people into physical or mental geography.
So, here is the importance of this work, that of giving voice, and a face, to the dominated.
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