Russia

"No, it’s not Turgenev who invites you on a jaunt across the immense Russian steppe, but the Romanian intellectual Andreï Ujika who takes you in his Lada on the road to Star City near Moscow. It’s the month of March, the weather is rotten. The sky is grey, streaked with heavy snowflakes. The concrete blocks in Moscow’s endless suburbs have gradually thinned, giving way to a forest of birch trees, dark as night. I’ve just spent two hours at a police station. I was picked up for photographing one of those impressive concrete blocks. It was finally decided that it was no longer forbidden for foreigners to photograph the said blocks.

(...) Star City, the temple of high technology, is vaguely suggestive of a rundown provincial cultural center except in a more massive form. Flurries of snow get mixed up with the disjointed metallic structure. Patches of the 1950s linoleum floor are peeling off. In the toilets, buckets replace flushes. (…) But once I get over this first impression of decay, Star City stirs the same feeling in me as Moscow did when I discovered it upon my arrival: an emanation of indestructible power. In Moscow, the avenues are wider; the constructions all seem monumental, anchored deep in the ground. Even the sweetest of dachas is sculpted from heavy wood. I felt unsettled by this encounter of a different kind with an invincible people."

Extract from Carnets de voyage 2, 2000, Éditions Gallimard