Victory Park

Photographs and text by Alexander Nikolsky, translated by Julia Altukhova, Mikhail Koninin.

Parks have always been used for unobtrusive broadcasting of cultural codes, usually through small architectural forms and monuments. Military machines is standing on pedestals in so-called “Victory Parks” as if they were left over from another parade. They are gradually creeping into the city spaces. These tanks and military aircrafts are ideologically associated with the cult of the Great Patriotic War but they are usually relatively new machines recently decommissioned from duties in military units. In support of this process even private citizens sometimes install the armored vehicles in they own private “parks”. These machines were instruments that were created to perform certain tasks. However, when they are turned into the monuments, they are reflecting a long-term vision of the government and serving as a material carrier of the growing military propaganda.

Militaristic ideological codes are common in contemporary media channels, where they are met both support and criticism. In contrast, parks are perceived as spaces free from ideological burden. Nevertheless, I find the presence of the militar1y equipment in the peaceful environments extremely unnatural. This observation does not apply to the territories where such monuments are historically justified, i.e. in the battlefields or at the military factories. I think it is important to highlight this channel of propaganda that nobody has noticed before.

Artefacts from the military industrial complex are widespread and for me the discovery of the original blueprints for missile weapons was not a particularly surprising find. I stumbled upon them in the ruins of a factory near my home. They subsequently served as a material for an origami, where their transformation was a literal transformation of technical information into a material object and an example of the conversion of ideas of superpowers into toys. They became the origami models of tanks and aircrafts of the “conditional enemy”, namely the countries of the West. During the Soviet era the image of external enemy was cultivated as a symbol of threat, and the modern propaganda uses the same techniques. The transformation of previously classified military blueprints into origami models was an act of personal demystification and combination simultaneously of the image of an external enemy and of the internal military ideology.

ALEXANDER NIKOLSKY, Kemerovo

Photographer and photography teacher. He graduated from Kemerovo State University (2008) and Kemerovo State University of Culture and Arts (2013 and 2015), FotoDepartment Institute.
Area of interest: visual imprints of culture in physical space. He works with photography, video and physical objects.