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The Potemkin Village
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About The Potemkin Village
Product Description According to legend, the phrase »Potemkin village« can be traced back to the Russian field marshal Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin. In 1787, the minion of Catherine the Great purportedly had entire villages erected as painted façades along the paths of her travels to the recently conquered Crimean territory in an effort to veil the true, run-down face of the region. Following Closed Cities (Kehrer 2012), Gregor Sailer’s new project once again presents actual architectural manifestations driven by political, military, and economic motives: combat training centers in the USA and Europe, faithful replicas of European cities in China, and vehicle test cities in Sweden. And finally, a classical Potemkin village in Russia, where, on the occasion of a visit by Vladimir Putin to Suzdal on the Golden Ring and a triple summit in the city of Ufa, whole streets were masked with adhesive foil, wallpaper, and tarpaulins in an effort to provide the abandoned buildings with a feigned sense of activity. Sailer’s pictures give the viewer access to the world of fakes, copies, and stage sets and call these at times absurd aberrations of our contemporary society into question. Review The British Journal of Photography,04/2017, Interview by Izabela Radwanska Zhang. The purpose of a ‘Potemkin village’ is to deceive. Taking its name from an apocryphal Russian tale, it is a town that is built solely to create the illusion that circumstances are better than they actually are. Gregor Sailer, an Austria-based designer and photographer, has taken this concept and interpreted it “with a wider angle”, travelling to all corners of the world to explore how and why these villages have come to exist in contemporary society. The series stems from Sailer’s Closed Cities project, which won him international recognition, and both look at how architecture reflects social or political changes in any given place. “But I didn’t just want to do Volume 2 of Closed Cities,” he says. “I was interested in showing a new world, a new picture language and a new atmosphere to outsiders. I’m more interested in the science of human beings than in the human beings themselves.” Sailer’s project partites into three chapters, as it will in a book published by Kehrer Verlag this autumn. The first looks at the pastiche European hamlets built on the outskirts of Shanghai, China – commuter towns located too far from the metropolis, never occupied and which still stand deserted. The next chapter looks at cities that were never meant to be lived in. Spending time with the US, British, French and German armies, Sailer photographed artificial cities created for military training, encountering Afghanstyle villages in California’s Mojave desert and Cold War relics in Europe. Finally, he visited Suzdal, northeast of Moscow, where shabby buildings were covered in “charming” printed canvases to hide the town’s decay from a visiting Vladimir Putin. Perhaps the most poignant assimilation of a Potemkin village is in the very place where the idea was born more than 200 years ago. Despite the varied locations, Sailer has controlled his aesthetic by adding another layer of illusion, all the while working in large format analogue film. “It’s important that there is a harmony between the series and the topic itself. It was not coincidence, it was criteria,” he says. “If you change the titles, you can’t distinguish between the pictures; you only know there and then where the picture was taken – it’s a game of illusion and reality.” Sailer’s first solo exhibition opens in Innsbruck in November, before heading to Vienna and Hamburg. He plans to persevere with his curiosity about restricted areas by working with the European Space Agency, as well as trying to get behind the doors of the most peculiar research facilities. “I don’t know if they’ll let me in. But it’s always difficult, and somehow I’ve managed. So I will manage this as well.” About the Author Gregor Sailer, born
