CIUDAD SECRETA
 
What remains of a utopian Soviet city? How is its history written? This is what Javier Arboledas sets out to explore through the topographical, human and remembered traces of Sosnovy Bor. His project takes shape through a process of sedimentation, its images like so many accumulated layers of time and memory. It catalogues places in the city that form part of a second-generation resident's memories, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, creating a kind of telescope through space and time between the idealised memory of a place and its present-day reality. Dreams of glory and their current decline implicitly reveal the collapse of the communist ideal. The project also includes a series of portraits of the city's present inhabitants, in which the icy winter sky contrasts with the summer light of the images of the territory. In this sense, one wonders what ultimately became of homo sovieticus.
 
Caroline Benichou, Paris, August 2022
 
Ciudad Secreta explores the memory of a Soviet city purpose-built, for the first time using the garden-city concept, for the development of civilian and military atomic energy. Through a catalogue of memories belonging to a second-generation resident who lived there, it ultimately invites us to reflect on what became of the “homo sovieticus” who once dreamed of being the “new Soviet man”.
 
The project arose from a need to understand such a distant and unfamiliar territory, because my life partner comes from there. As Jean Luc Godard said, “the motivation for making films does not come from an intention to change the world, simply from a need to understand it”.
 
It is, coincidentally, in the current sociopolitical context that the relevance of this work becomes apparent, revealing a representation of the collective psychology of the Russian people and adding a necessary perspective on the invasion of Ukraine.