Grozny: Nine Cities

Tbilisi Photo Festival

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:20:45 +0300

Grozny: Nine Cities project will be part of the third annual Tbilisi Photo Festival and its open-air screenings in Tbilisi’s Old City. On June, 4 at 17.00 - GROZNY : NINE CITIES: meeting with Stanley Green, Yuri Kozyrev, Olga Kravets, Oksana Yushko, and Maria Morina will take place. Venue: Georgian National Museum Auditorium, 1, Purtseladze Street

Grozny: Nince Cities project in Lima

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:15:10 +0300

Grozny: Nine Cities 5 minutes multimedia is showcased in the FOLiLABS (Museo de Fotografía Lima’s experimental containers within different public spaces of Lima) during the First Biennale of Photography of Lima organised by the Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima and Centro de la Imagen from 19th of March to 19th of April 2012.

Grozny: Nine Cities (10 Photos) | PDN Photo of the Day __ The...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:10:00 +0200

Grozny: Nine Cities (10 Photos) | PDN Photo of the Day
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The shop window in the newly opened Grozny City shopping mall / Guests at a posh wedding party in a rich house outside of Grozny, 2010. Photos by Olga Kravets

Huge thanks to all our amazing bakers (in alphabetical...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:56:00 +0200

Huge thanks to all our amazing bakers (in alphabetical order):
Aleksandr Sholomon,
Alexandra Anikina,
Alice Lagnado,
Aliona van der Horst,
Anna Loshkin,
Christian Esch,
Ciril Jazbec,
Dmitriy Velikovskiy,
Dmitry Ilyevsky,
Eugenia Maximova,
Galina Timchenko,
Gennady Victorov,
Gregory Eidinov,
Guillaume Herbaut,
Helen Rimell,
Igor Fridman,
Ilya Timakov,
Irina Sheludkova,
Jose Bautista,
Jussi Niemelainen,
Katja Heinemann,
Laura Montanari,
Laura Saunders,
Louis Quail,
Madeleine Leroyer,
Maria Ponomareva,
Maria Turchenkova,
Maria Vassilieva,
Markku Niskanen,
Mila Teshaieva,
Nicolas Mingasson,
Olaf Koens,
Oleg Cheremin,
Peter Evans,
Reem Akl,
Regina Mamykina,
Sara Terry,
Sergey Lisitskiy,
Sergey Ponomarev,
Simon Kruse Rasmussen,
Steve Mepsted,
Susanna Niinivaara,
Tanja Aitamurto,
Tommaso Barsali,
Tommaso Protti,
Vlad Sokhin,
Yuri Kozyrev,
and 22 our dear anonymous friends!!!
And also to all of you who share, share and share our links and spread our words about the project!
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Photo by Oksana Yushko, 2009

We are funded! Thanks a lot to all our friends! Now it’s...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:50:00 +0200

We are funded! Thanks a lot to all our friends! Now it’s time for us to move on to research for the upcoming trip that you all, dear friends, made possible.

“The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.”

We want to thank all our dear friends who believed in us, many many thanks for your support, for you friendship and faith in our work and special thanks for your help in putting all together (in alphabetical order):
Alice Lagnado,
Andrei Polikanov,
Anna Nemtsova,
Anna Zekria,
Anna Shpakova,
Anton Nossik,
Belen Becerra,
Dimi Reider,
Galina Timchenko,
Irina Meglinskaya,
Joerg Colberg,
José Bautista,
Katya Bogachevskaya,
Karim Ben Khelifa,
Lenta.ru,
Liza Faktor,
Maria Zakharova,
Misha Fridman,
Peter Bitzer,
Susanna Niinivaara,
Sylo Taraku,
Tina Ahrens,
Yulia Vishnevetskaya,
Yuri Kozyrev,
and Vladimir Neskoromny.

Love from three of us!
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photos by Maria Morina. Russian soldiers are guarding the only orthodox church in Grozny. View of the church yard and Grozny city, 2011. A road in the outskirts of Grozny, 2011.

Grozny: Nince Cities project in Lenta.ru

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:34:13 +0200

We are really happy that our project was published in Russian for the first time in Lenta.ru (one of the leading media portals in Russia) special project Country that ceased to exist. For the first time we’ve also presented there a number of the interviews taken for the project, including the one with Akhmed Zakayev, one of the best-known Chechen exiles.

Crowdfunding campaign on Emphas.is

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:37:31 +0200

It has been amazing journey of almost two months since we launched our campaign on Emphas.is - the website that offers photojournalists a chance to interact directly with the public and to secure funding outside of the mainstream media.

We have been supported by 47 backers so far (there might be more already when you visit the website!), and what is may be the most important, we have established channels of communication with the future audience for our project. We’ve reached Chechens not only in Chechnya, but in diaspora in UK, Norway, Belgium, Finland and Jordan. We had the first Russian publication of the project by Lenta.ru - leading online media in Russia, which was a great start of sharing what we’ve done for the past two years with Russian audience. As Irina Meglinskaya, the prominent Russian curator noted on the importance of crowdfunding for projects on Russia, “it’s just a new form of financing stories about civil society by civil society itself at the times, when many seek funding either in US State Department or in Kremlin”.

There have been also interviews by BBC’s The Strand

and Voice of Russia in London

and posts by DVAFOTO

and Conscientious

The responsibility is huge now. We HAVE to finish shooting the project. We HAVE to be in Chechnya on the election day, March 4, to witness the return of Vladimir Putin, responsible for the start of the second war in Chechnya, from there.

We are still beyond our funding goal, but it seems perfectly reachable - there are recent examples of crowdfunding showing that people even got far more than the funding goal in the last few days.

Please support us with a pledge or publication! Every little helps! 2014 will mark the 20th anniversary of the first Chechen war and we need to have a web-documentary launched before it, which requires us finishing shooting this year.

Big thanks in advance from all three of us!
Olga, Maria, and Oksana

Waiters in a fashionable cafe near the main market. View of the...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:47:58 +0200

Waiters in a fashionable cafe near the main market.
View of the city center.
Photos by Maria Morina, 2010
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Grozny: Nine Cities project crowdfunding campaign on Emphasis. Please, be a backer for our Grozny: Nine Cities project!

Opening ceremony of the Memorial Complex In Honor Of Akhmat...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:12:45 +0200

Opening ceremony of the Memorial Complex In Honor Of Akhmat Kadyrov in the centre of Grozny. Photos by Maria Morina and Oksana Yushko, 2010
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Grozny: Nine Cities project crowdfunding campaign on Emphasis. Please, be a backer for our Grozny: Nine Cities project!

Please, be a backer for our Grozny: Nine Cities project! Our...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:12:00 +0200

Please, be a backer for our Grozny: Nine Cities project!

Our goal is to raise $7.500 to fund our next trip to Grozny. The result of the project will be shown in an installation consisting of a two and three screen multimedia essay and prints, a web-documentary, and a book.
Please support us on www.emphas.is

Nine Cities: an essay on post-conflict Grozny, Kigali and Pristina

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:57:01 +0300

By Christian Jennings

The victors in wars re-build the cities they conquer or occupy in the image of their triumph; the myriad peoples who have to live in such cities after wars bear the image of that victory on their faces, in their daily lives and in what circumstances after the conflict make of them. The losers tend not to see the city ever again, unless, like prisoners of the Roman legions bought back to the centre of Empire to die as gladiators on the sands of the Colosseum for the pleasure of the crowds, they get to enjoy one last afternoon of urban sunlight before they meet their maker.

Kigali, capital of Rwanda, is and was such a city. So is Pristina in Kosovo, and Grozny. And Sarajevo, Phnom Penh, Saigon, Kabul and Beirut – the list is as long as history. For a city to be re-born after a war, it first has to be destroyed, torn down, fought over or re-invented. Grozny in the first Chechen war in 1994 was, for the world, a series of images that bought to mind Stalingrad and Dresden. Kigali was different. Despite being the epicentre of the 1994 genocide, and despite being fought over as the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from neighbouring Uganda to put a halt to the slaughter, it always somehow looked beautiful. The simple size and dominance of geography in Africa makes sure of that. A million bullet-holes could be covered up by that vast and eternal blue sky.
Pristina never looked beautiful. “The ugliest city in the former Yugoslavia even before NATO bombed it,” quipped one British Army officer arriving in a Challenger tank at the head of liberating NATO forces in June 1999, just after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign forced then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table, and the atrocity-prone Serb soldiers, paramilitaries and policemen to retreat back to Serbia proper.

Then, led by the Albanian political cabal that sprung out of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Pristina became Albanian. The Serbs left, or were forced out. And the Albanians that made the new Pristina have many abilities, many talents, much drive to make their new homeland their own. But unfortunately when the Gods were giving out a sense of visual aesthetics, architectural style, litter control and urban management, post-war Kosovo was in the bathroom.

And out of the ruins of war spring the nine cities inspired by the Thornton Wilder book, Theophilus North. The central theme to this book is that nine cities are hidden in one, and despite their differing politics, geography, economy and climate, Kigali, Grozny and Pristina fit this theme. The first city is always the one that ceased to exist through war, where the leaders and much of the population are dead, fled or imprisoned, the city that will always live in the past tense, its name constantly prefixed by the words “before the war.”

The second city is the war itself, and the expressions thereof. Genocide memorials in Kigali, Chechen rebels hiding in the mountains outside Grozny, NATO soldiers still on the streets of Pristina. Religion comes hand in hand with godlessness these days, and into the moral vacuum that combat leaves behind it come the Gods, in all their different shapes and sizes, normally decided by whichever altar or temple the winning warlord, dictator, general or president worships at. The taste for conversion to Islam in post-genocide Rwanda as a reaction to the implication of the Catholic Church in the events of ’94. The wholesale destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches in Kosovo by Albanians. The Islamicisation of Chechnya.

Men and women are the fourth and fifth cities, the women discovering a new role for themselves, often, as in Rwanda, having to take the lead in households where there are no men anymore. Or in Kosovo, well-educated Kosovo Albanian girls and women leading the employment market in the new, international-community led economic environment. And behind them come the men, either dynamic and forward-looking, like many Rwandan Tutsis, somehow determined never to be doomed to repeat the past. But conflict stirs complex emotions in men, and far too often the menfolk still drag their psycho-social knuckles, and many is the Chechen, Albanian and Rwandan male who looks in the mirror in the morning and still sees the reflection of the warrior that fought in the war, or, too often, somehow missed it.

The victims of wars, those from the ethnicity that lost, those who pay heed to the ruling class form the sixth city, the city of servants. The Pristina physics professor turned taxi driver, those whose socio-economic lives were upended by war leaving them at the bottom, rather than the top of the pile. Number seven is the city of money, of why people so often fight, of Chechnya’s oil interests, of Kigali’e elite looking westwards to the mineral wealth of eastern Democratic Congo. Wandering the city are the eighth city, the strangers, those out of place, not from there, the eternal visitors, or, like in Grozny, those left behind by change, like the ethnic Russians. Or, conversely, the newly arrived, like the four-wheel drive vehicles, large budgets and inane Brussels gibberish of the newly-arrived international community.

And all around these eight cities is the ninth city of normality, of people for whom life is reflected in micro concerns, where the bullet-hole, the shell-crater, the new government, the shift in religion, all is forgiven, all is ignored so long as daily life can go on, the concerns those for whom life can drop anything from the sky, so long as it does not arrive in their backyards.

Prints sale

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:22:27 +0300

The Aftermath Project is selling prints from 2010 grant winners and finalists to help raise funds for our $15,000 NEA matching grant for publishing this year’s book, “War is Only Half the Story, Vol Four”, which is also featuring Grozny: Nine Cities project.

Prints by Maria Morina, Olga Kravets, Oksana Yushko, and many others including Sara Terry and Marcus Bleasdale, are available.

Download the Annual Fundraiser Brochure to view prints and information.

Men are performing Dhikr, a Sufi religious practice, at a...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:37:54 +0300

Men are performing Dhikr, a Sufi religious practice, at a funeral. Photo By Oksana Yushko.

The pipes that used to be part of the oil refinery facilities in Grozny. All of them were bombed...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 02:05:00 +0300

The pipes that used to be part of the oil refinery facilities in Grozny. All of them were bombed and destroyed during the wars. Photo by Olga Kravets

The officials attend Victory Day celebrations in Grozny. Photo by Maria Morina

Before the wedding, photo by Olga Kravets.

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:34:46 +0300

Before the wedding, photo by Olga Kravets.

Celebration

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:09:51 +0300

A rich wedding party. Picture by Maria Morina

A boy and a girl dancing lezginka, a national dance, in the centre of Grozny. Picture by Oksana Yushko

Victory Day

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:49:00 +0300

Picture by Oksana Yushko

School girls

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:47:00 +0300

Picture by Maria Morina

Tashkala Garden

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:44:00 +0300

Picture by Olga Kravets

Overheard in Grozny

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:08:00 +0300

Soldier 1. Well, you know, it’s.. it’s not our country, in any case. How can it be our
country? Everything is done their way, everything. You can’t go up to a woman and talk
to her.

Soldier 2. They’ll look at you strangely.

Soldier 1. Not just look at you. They’ll come and find you at your army base. And then
deliver you in a bag to your bosses, in pieces.

Soldier 2. Come on!

Soldier 1. Why? This is for real. I’ve even talked to local policemen about this. How things really are.

Soldier 2. They’ll bullshit you on purpose.

Soldier 1. Why on purpose? They’ll say, for instance, that if a brother sees you touching
his sister…

Soldier 2. Well of course, in that case…

Soldier 1. And if you talk to her he is practically having heartburn, he’ll run up to you and say: ‘What do you want, what and how?’ I wouldn’t even go there. But the bosses gave me the choice – either come here or back to civvy street. And what’s going on there? The [financial] crisis is still going on.

These are some conversations we recorded of Russian soldiers chatting as they stood
guard over the only Russian Orthodox church in Grozny.