Danila Tkachenko Documents Abandoned Soviet Sites Of “Almost Inhuman Complexity”

“I traveled in search of places which used to hold great importance”, Tkachenko says. “These places are now deserted. They have lost their significance, along with their utopian ideology which is now obsolete.” Traveling throughout the former Soviet Union, Tkachenko photographed artefacts from another age—abandoned and decaying, frozen in ice and in time. “Many of these places were once secret cities, that did not appear on any maps or public records”, he continues. “The sites of forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came.” In photographing these decaying sites, Tkachenko points to the futility of our desire for constant progress. “Humans are always trying to own ever more than they have”, he explains. As history shows, such progress is too often tempered by violence—for people, and for the land, the good is almost always outweighed by the bad.