Danila Tkachenko

To be honest, I don't know. I try to be open to what life offers, so it could be anything. I think that you can enjoy any activity and get a reward from it. Before I took up photography, my work was far from being an art form; I worked as a barman in nightclubs and then I had an alcohol business.

For me, art and photography are an attempt to take a certain distance from the world around me in order to see it from a different perspective and find new meanings. Looking from the periphery helps me to take that very distance from everyday life.

I was invited to Qatar by the Qatar Museums. I was there for the first time, and I was struck by the contrast between modernity and the archaic – an archaic society living in the modern world of skyscrapers and new technologies. The skyscrapers standing in the middle of the desert are a symbol of the dawn of capitalist progress in this country, and they reminded me of a mirage. I wanted to ask whether capitalist progress is a trap for the national identity of this nation or not. After I had formulated the idea for myself, I searched for locations to shoot in the surrounding desert. After finding and preparing the chosen locations in advance, I staged the shooting with the models.

I always try to find as much information about an object as possible – most often on the Internet – before I start shooting it. I always knew what I would shoot, where I had to go and how long it would take me to get there. It took me about three years to shoot the whole series. I shot in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Bulgaria. As a rule, all the objects were already abandoned. The greatest danger was posed by weather conditions: blizzards, cold, vast areas of snow. Quite often, the equipment failed and I had to quickly resolve problems in extreme situations.

In every shooting, there was something challenging; the most difficult was to get the right weather. Shooting in Bulgaria, I spent almost a week on a mountain waiting for the clouds to dissipate in order to make a single shot of the former headquarters of the Communist Party. Very often, I had to use snowshoes. I bought a warm jacket like the one Nordic janitors have. Handwarmers, warm shoes – big boots for winter fishing. For each object, I had to find a different approach. In some places, I was leaving sticks as markers because, in the middle of the snowstorm, you don’t see anything. Sometimes, I had to go to some abandoned house to change the film. In some places, I had to arrange a cross-country vehicle.

It was one of the questions I was deciding for myself. Before that, I had an interesting and hard experience: I got lost in the forest in Altai (Russia) and spent a month there without people. I noticed that after spending time alone, my thinking and behaviour began to change. It led me to believe that I was the absolute result of the cultural context in which I grew up and that my identity was an artificial construction created under this influence. I was interested in meeting people who had cut themselves off from society for a long time, comparing themselves to others, and understanding how a person develops outside the cultural context. In this project, I was more interested in society than in the phenomenon of hermits. Looking at them, I studied the social environment and its impact on myself.

All my projects start with long research and work on the Internet. In this case, I searched for any information about people who had left to live alone away from civilization. I searched for notes on travellers' forums, local mass media, and called forestries of sparsely populated areas. This took more than a year. Then, according to the plan, I went on travelling. I made my way to a village near the assumed hermit and sought information from the locals.
Most of the information was false, but still, in two years, I found about fifteen people. I took food with me to motivate the hermits to contact me. After a year of shooting the project, an unpleasant situation happened: I lost all the films, so I had to go around all the heroes for a second time. But in the end, it was good, I was able to focus the visual concept more precisely. For example, there is no sky in the photographs in this series.

Usually, I was introducing myself, telling about my project and showing my previous work. Every time, I had some presents with me – the most precious was food as they often live far from civilization. If they agreed to be photographed, I waited for suitable light conditions and made the photos.

It was an important project for me emotionally, it was a farewell and burning dead things. To some extent, it was a burial ritual. In my country, in my opinion, the attitude towards death and outdated things is not developed. Because of this, one can observe how long-dead concepts come to life and function. To a greater extent, it’s used by the Government to manipulate society. This is partly why we have an unburied corpse in the main square of the country.

It was important to me that no one was hurt by my actions and that the project remained within the bounds of the law. This project, as well as others, was conceived with long preparation: consultations with lawyers and studying of the law, a search of remote places that do not belong to anybody and unsuitable for restoration, the gathering of the information on them, preparation of building of additional designs and scenery, etc. This is one of the most difficult and expensive projects that I had to do.

Recently, I have become interested in the phenomenon of the triumph of broadcast mass media, how it distorts and intertwines with important social problems. Also, the phenomenon of the post-imperial syndrome.

The most useful experience is a collision with failure. Almost every job I do goes through failure, only after which I can build a good job. False actions make up most of the work, but they are as important as the end result. Problems should be treated with respect.

The hardest part is finding the shape. To find it and create it, you need to try all sorts of options. This requires a lot of willpower and stubbornness.

I would advise every day to discover a new author, to educate your visual and semantic experience. Find those authors you are most interested in, study them and don’t be afraid to copy, go through them on something of your own.