This project arose from the negatives of pictures made by Andrey Volkov in the 1970s. Volkov was in need of material for his paintings and, thus, far less concerned with the quality of the photos than with composition patterns that could be reworked into signs of the time. Today we would problably define them as “style-generating cliches”.  These hundreds of photographic sketches marked by a very personal take on the urban environment. Some of this pictures were later used by Volkov as a basis for his paintings.
Volkov’s painting is a precise and well articulated artistic statement. It represents the communal cultural environment of the seventies as something impersonal and desolate where “dehumanization” is not a bookish concept, but the actual state and meaning of this particular place in this particular time, a materialized form of culture. Even the artist’s personality seems to have frozen in some hyperreal  form of language, as if the sound of natural speech were replaced by an easily identifiable script-font.

Human voices fall silent and disappear in the city, some separate collocations used as elements of frontspieces or squares are all that’s left behind. And when they finally reappear, they bear of traces of this absolute numbness that envelopes the City.
Moscow seems to have kept its constructive rigor, but its rhythms have faded as it kept sinking in the past, getting more and more blurred, indistinct, unstructured, meaningless and almost fake.  This city is not about the people who live here, but it’s not about itself either. It spends too much time benumbed, like a crippled body, putting the little energy it has in maintaining the carcasses of the old houses and the skeletons of the new buildings aligned.  The reality and materiality that the artist insists upon  develop into inhumanity and insanity (as parameters of the cultural situation) and end up in delusiveness and ghostliness.

This city belongs to a culture solely concerned with staying the way it is, which means falsifying its actual state and the real state of affairs. This popular and official, ceremonial culture ends up mummified and shrivelled. So is the city: shrivelled and “voiceless like a ghost” to quote Boris Pasternak.

Ghostliness is constitutive of the spirit of the time we are talking about and in the same time it is a form of existence for the “big” culture. “Ghostliness” means the shadow of an idea-based scheme: the “big” culture is nothing but fiction, but it is also the ground that the shoots of new culture grom from, it is the place where something distinct is arising.