Paolo Ciregia: Perestrojka

“Perestroika” (Russian for “restructuring”) refers to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system during the 80’s, that aimed to do reforms and to soften the Soviet regime. However, these efforts failed and led the Soviet regime to an end. That probably marked the starting point of the current tensions in Ukraine. Another failure has also been the unethical way to talk about war: so that a new approach, able to stir up people’s feelings, is very much needed.
The second concept behind Perestroika is “Glasnost” (“openness”): that was about the (alleged) fight against corruption, and about freedom of expression. This same transparency is, almost literally, expressed by the artist via deleting the most improper elements of the photographs of war, i.e. the ones we are mostly accustomed to; as a paradox, censorship is used as powerful means of social condemnation. The bodies, already lifeless, are deprived of their own image, the latter being empty and anesthetized; the two- dimensional cut offers a three-dimensional perception, its weight and physical space hidden behind this void, a white shape that cannot leave us uninterested.

With the reportage of the young photographer Paolo Ciregia‘s private archives, shot during four years to document the Ukrainian war – from the riots in Maidan Square, to the parting of the Crimea, to the war in Donbass – he reconstruct such events with overlaps, cuts and corrosions. The aim is to create a different iconographic repertoire, to revise and to change the way to tell the war, without erasing the historical and cultural roots of such events. A work that tastes Soviet with echoes of constructivism.