It is just under three months since the start of 2022 and my last newsletter. In it, I imagined new resolutions for the coming year and wished myself - and wished you - a happy new year and a timid exit from two years of Covid pandemic that has marked us deeply.
Hopes for a social, human, economic recovery seem to have been swept away on the night of 24 February 2022. Indeed they have been swept away for the Ukrainian people brutally attacked by the anachronistic madness of an autocrat turned warmongering dictator.
Medyka, Poland, March 10 2022. Refugees from Ukraine waiting at the border to board the train to Przemysl to recive firts assistance before moving to other Polish and European town. ©Davide Monteleone.
Personally and professionally, it is a challenging moment. The years that have bound me, and still tie me, to Russia and more broadly to the space defined as Ex-Soviet (now sadly back in the news) should have made it easier for me to assess the scenarios of this war. Still, like many, I have made the wrong predictions and underestimated Putin's growing madness.
Beyond my professional experience, this situation touches and pierces me from many sides. Certainly, the human aspect, which, I believe, involves every individual with common sense capable of feeling empathy and emotion for the tragedy and the loss of human life that is taking place in Ukraine and for which I can only express my unconditional solidarity.
This suffering is also amplified by what is happening in the invading country and the personal ties I have with Russia. I have spent days contacting friends and acquaintances who have been detained, who feel endangered by the increasing repression. I have talked to friends who have decided to leave the country, almost with shame and guilt, unable to think or even imagine a different solution.
"I never wanted to leave my country. Even with the troubles of the Soviet legacy, I love it, but my country does not love me. Russia doesn't even love itself."
"I am an above-average scientist in my field, I don't want to go back to living behind the Iron Curtain, but I don't want to hide from reality in Istanbul or Yerevan either."
"I left my house in rubble, my husband. I want to take my daughter to Berlin. I keep thinking that in the tragedy, this could be a chance for her to start a new life."
"I am Ukrainian, my parents are of Polish/Ukrainian origin, I lived in Omsk, Russia, most of my life I was an officer in the Soviet army. I don't understand why all this is happening. I talked to my friends in Russia. They don't understand, some of them don't believe us, they don't believe that their bombs are coming to our houses."
"Our people have traumatically learned what life in jail is, a life in the Gulag means. They would rather be poor and repressed than imagine life in prison. That's why we don't know how to rebel anymore; we don't know how to protest anymore. We are marked by generations."
"Since the last 15 years (my parents' generation would say much, much earlier), modern Russia has been slowly and steadily sliding towards the darkness in which we now find ourselves. There were obvious signs - Bolotnaya, Crimea, the laws against homosexuals and those against foreign agents', but basically - and this is the worst thing - life went on as usual. At every moment, the trajectory was silently and inaccurately corrected. And here we are, and there is no strength to react, extinguish or prove anything because my arms have long since fallen off. Those who govern us are wandering in the dark and have not learned how to run the country so that the citizens themselves are happy to live there. They only know how to steal, to corrupt, to fight. No to war, but above all, no to Putin and this system."
I am writing down only a few of my conversations with friends and acquaintances, both Russian and Ukrainian. I voluntarily omit names and origins. On the one hand, to protect their identity, on the other, Ukrainians also share the concerns of some in Russia (though unfortunately not all). I am reminded of the chronicles collected by Svyatlana Aleksievic (Belarusian) in her "Second Hand Time". A choral tale in which one almost no longer recognises the voices or identities of all those people affected differently but equally by the drama of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tormenting birth of a 'new Russia'.
Putin's childish and macabre desire for a 'new Russia', which seems to underlie his heinous actions these days, seems sad to be an inaugural success. To return two countries, if not the whole world, to the suffering from which they had hoped to be emancipated.
Moscow, Russia, May 2017. Celebration for the Victory Day. ©Davide Monteleone
The problem is perhaps not the "fratricidal war", as it is often rhetorically described, but rather the nightmare to return to the past. A past that some had painstakingly and perhaps mistakenly hoped to have overcome.
In the drama of these events, I cannot fail to observe how the issues that intersect these days have long been close to my interests and professional practice.
Not the war itself, but rather the causes and consequences of it. Issues that are often more complex than the immediate news. The case of NATO enlargement and Putin's outlandish claims force us to reflect on the geopolitical dynamics that have taken place since 1991 between the West and Russia and which today include relations with China. The drama of the Ukrainian refugees insidiously opens up the question of migration policies and the intrinsic phenomena of racism and inequality. The energy and economic crisis linked to the import of Russian gas and the sanctions put back into play the transition process that has barely begun towards green energy and the protection of our planet. The repression and cancellation of civil rights in Russia, and the aggression in Ukraine, expose the danger of how quickly established democratic principles can be wiped out by a stroke of the sponge. They call into question cultural and historical identities that we used to think were unassailable with a certain degree of certainty, at least in the West.
In recent years I have tried to tackle these themes with the aid of the image, questioning myself more and more about its actual usefulness, the limits and communicative prerogatives of the technical picture. I have been thinking about how conflicts and pain are represented, about identity. The possibility of producing visual stories about imperceptible themes such as the economy or geopolitics.
I have had difficulty connecting my projects under a single narrative and aesthetic heading. Still, suddenly this crisis seems to give a sense to the various elements of my work. They sometimes remain disjointed and difficult to connect. Nevertheless, I can't help but see, for example, in the desire to document the Ukrainian conflict, a similarity with the intent that drove me, ten years ago, to narrate the erasure of Chechen identity perpetrated by Russia.
Republic of Chechnya, Russia, 03/2013. A group of men performing the ritual dance of dzikr, in Arabic: “Remembrance [of God”, “pronouncement”, “invocation”). Dhikr, or zikr, is an Islamic devotional act, typically involving the repetition of the names of God, supplications or formulas taken from texts and verses of the Koran. Dzikr is usually done individually, but in some Sufi orders it is instituted as a ceremonial activity. ©Davide Monteleone.
Similarly, I recognise in Beijing's current diplomatic stance on the conflict what I found in Sinomocene's work on Chinese economic expansion in the world and the soft power strategy applied.
Dara Sakor, Cambodia, December 2019. Chinese investors visiting the area of Dara Sakor. ©Davide Monteleone.
All the issues I have addressed seem to be united by a subtle common theme.
The intention here is certainly not to praise me for insights I didn't know I had, but rather to rediscover the importance of the job that many of my colleagues and I do and that for some time I questioned: reporting on what is happening in the world. My approach is often pedagogical, if not informative. Recently, I have had the fear, sometimes held up as an opportunity, that the age of information would partly give way to more conceptual visual languages.
This conflict, this crisis, made me rediscover, perhaps because it touches me so closely that I must revalue the importance of documentary images, the value of knowing what is really going on clearly and directly. It may be another wrong prediction of mine. However, I still hope the practice may prevent, where possible, to fall into the same historical errors, and preserve the principles of things we consider essential.
This does not mean renouncing more complex and elaborate narratives, let alone indulging in stereotyped, simplified or letteral representations. However, it does serve to remind me of the importance of the document, memory, and personal and collective history.
As a note to myself, I intend these first few pages as an introduction from which to start and to elaborate on the topics touched on only marginally.