Final Analysis
Peter Dench considers... ‘Abandoned office for the construction of the Nadezhda (Hope) Factory, Norilsk, Russia’, by Arseniy Kotov
It’s an early December morning and a bit cold in my office (desk at the end of my bed). The temperature reads 7°C. I pull on a 100% polyester hand-washonly Fila brand gilet. The sash windows are draughty and speckled with black mould. Condensation is running down them, pooling into a gloop which I mop up with Tesco toilet paper. I’m tempted to turn on the heating ahead of its programmed time of 4pm. Instead I leaf through Soviet Seasons by Arseniy Kotov (Fuel Design & Publishing 2021).
During the winter of 2019, Kotov travelled extensively across Siberia. Siberia covers 57% of the whole of Russia but contains only 11% of its population. The 9,734,000 (give or take) square kilometres is roughly equal to the surface area of Pluto. It is home to the world’s longest single-track railway journey, the Trans-Siberian Railway – 5,772 miles across seven time zones in seven days. A highlight of the journey is passing Lake Baikal, which is the oldest and deepest lake in the world with a depth of 5,387 feet (1,642 metres) containing more than 20% of the world’s fresh surface water. It has gobsmacking vistas across deep blue waters and spectacular mountain ranges.
Siberia is big and cold. According to The Siberian Times, the lowest officially recorded temperature was -67.7°C in 1933. Brrrrrr. Entire carcasses of extinct mammoths have been found in its frozen earth; the best known, Yuka, was discovered by local Siberian tusk hunters in 2010 and turned over to local scientists who made an initial assessment of the carcass before it went on to be displayed in Moscow.
This photograph is taken in Norilsk, a city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located north of the Arctic Circle. Snowdrifts can reach as high as the third floor of a building. The early buildings of Norilsk were built on strip foundations set on a rock base under which sections of ice can be found. When the ice melts, cracks form in the foundations and the buildings become unfit for living, and residents are then resettled
‘In Norilsk, snowdrifts can reach as high as the third floor of a building’
elsewhere. The city of 176,000 inhabitants has long been recognised as one of the most polluted places on Earth as the world’s biggest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel and a top producer of platinum, cobalt and copper.
I assume the footprints in the photograph are Kotov’s. Perhaps he went to check what the objects were on the table – maybe a plate and a jar holding an ineffective candle. It’s a simple, still, emotive and slightly surreal image. If it comes down to the power of the environment versus pollution, on the evidence of this photograph, I’d give the environment a fighting chance. Feeling much cosier, I put Soviet Seasons back on the shelf and fetched some black mould removal spray from the kitchen.