Jeremy Knowles - A Desperate Run
'A Desperate Run' is a photography series recorded in Chişinău, Moldova, in 2023. The scenes and observations presented in this series are based upon a walking conversation through Ciocana - a district of the city built in the 1960s to quickly accommodate Chişinău's growing population at that time - with two Ciocana residents. Both the conversation and subsequent photographs explore how everyday life in Moldova has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how the Western ideology of 'democracy through capitalism' is still affecting changes to the physical environment of Chişinău today.
Excerpt from walking conversation:
J – Do you feel like this removal of murals – maybe like this one, in this Social Realism style – was part of a 'de-Sovietising' process?
O – I would think about it as a... like a desperate run. You know? Not a conscious one, just a desperate one, I would say, because, and this is only my opinion, no matter what happens to a country, plainly running away from our history is never the right option, I think. It will not give you anything good, at least.
J – To erase it?
O – Yeh. Because, by erasing your own history, I think, you are even more prone to delve into a completely new identity which will, very likely, have a nationalistic character to it. Like a new wave of… “this is what defines us” and “this is why we are better than others”, by conclusion. You know? And I think that’s dangerous. I think we should always keep a debate – an actual perception of what our different histories were and how they interacted to come to what we are today.
