I therefore decided to travel to Star City — the heart of the Russian Space programme. A small town 25km North-East of Moscow, it was a top-secret location in the Soviet Union. Both a residential and training complex for cosmonauts and people serving the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre (GCTC), it was once described as a Communist oasis with star men living in gleaming silver towers or the only place where the promised Soviet Communism could be found.
However, with the Russian Space programme facing an uncertain future, the glory of the olden days had gone. Facing poor living conditions and small salaries, this community survives only through its passion for space and their extraordinary goal of reaching stars. Due to the insularity of this world the physical space and its spirit has been preserved. As if trapped in a window of time, this place is an imprint of an era that no longer exists. Welcoming you with a friendly, calm socialist atmosphere it seems like you are travelling back in time, while Gagarin statues and portraits gaze at you from every corner. The training facility itself quickly became my point of focus, as the life in Star City revolves around it and it is where you discover a sort of dreamland from which people never seem to leave. A strange place of visual contradictions where grim cement buildings covered in peeling paint rise from cracked pavements. Hidden inside are surreal machines that you could only expect to encounter in Jules Vernes's books.
Meeting with people working at the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre, you definitely see that for them Gagarin is a hero, working in the space field for years and years. It seems like the air they breath is filled with stardust. Suspended in time, they almost blend with the surreal machines they work with. The physical space they evolve in shapes their everyday reality. Their motivation remains their childhood dream and they follow it, as if unaware of what is happening elsewhere in the country.
In this project I wanted to display both an image of reality and memory, combining two dimensions — the present and the past. A hypnotic and sometimes surreal composition of a place and residents that initially seem unremarkable but work towards an incredible goal. In the Shadow of Faded Dreams aims to reveals the nostalgia associated to the USSR's status of Space superpower and sheds light on a close-knit community of Space-lovers, still clinging to the decaying legacy of the 1960s Space dream. Zlata Rodionova (@zlata07)