Patina

I grew up in Soviet Russia. My peers and I had Soviet cartoons, cinema, football, skates, bicycles, but what we really wanted were games consoles and video recorders.

Then the country in which I was born stopped existing. The space of the Soviet deficit was now replaced with the abundance of the capitalist world. The culture of East and West was seeping through, along with Snickers chocolate bars and Chinese Adidas fakes.

Now, about 30 years later, video recorders and games consoles are packed into the smartphone. But I go to the shop and buy “Soviet” things. I dig them at flea markets, seek them inside the houses and in the garages of my friends. On the photographs, in the hands of young people – those who even did not live in the Soviet Union – these things turn into paradoxical objects. The objects that promise a brighter future that will never arrive.