ERIC LUSITO. "AFTER THE WALL.TRACES OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE"

02.02.12. – 26.02.12 From February 2nd until February 26th, Latvia’s Photography Museum will present French photographer Eric Lusito’s work from the series „After the Wall. Traces of the Soviet Empire”, which will be exhibited on both floors of the museum. Photographs from this series were taken while Lusito was traveling throughout the former Soviet Union countries, including Latvia. He documented Soviet military bases, the surrounding area and the bases' interiors, all of which have long since been abandoned. Lusito’s project discovers places that were not accessible or impossible to see by the average person. The exhibition consists of Lusito's photographs in which these places are documented, as well as posters, Politburo portraits found on army bases and other materials. „After the wall. Traces of the Soviet Empire” is a long-term project on the border between art and documentary photography. The project began in 2002, when the photographer was traveling through Eastern Europe and met a geography professor from the Czech Republic, who invited him to visit one abandoned army base in the Czech Republic. As the photographer says in an interview for Fotokvartals: „That was an exciting sight that awoke my imagination. I started to understand the power and threat of the Red army, what it embodied. The professor told me about other military bases and I decided to travel around the ex-Soviet territory in search of the remains of the USSR's ambitions and power.” Francis Conte, Professor of Russian & Soviet Culture, University of Paris-Sorbonne, describes the project very well:”Eric Lusito’s work is layered with semiotic richness. There is the aesthetic level: his discovery of tone, light and composition, but one is also struck by his perseverance and the compelling nature of his choice of subjects. […]Lusito tries to understand the system and its evolution – the USSR as paradise, hell, and purgatory successively or simultaneously. In this collection of photographs, Lusito shows two interests which are deeply interwoven: firstly, both art as propaganda and propaganda as art in the former Soviet Union, and secondly the ruins and the aesthetic attraction that the act of looking at these ruins provokes in the viewer.” Eric Lusito was born in 1976, Italy, but moved to live in France. He is a self-taught photographer who has received many awards in photography. He has participated in group and solo exhibitions in the USA, France, Morocco, Germany and Lithuania, where in 2011 this project was included in the program for Kauna’s Photo Festival. Works by Lusito are in the permanent collection of the „Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations” in France, the „Regional Contemporary Art Collections” in Bretagne, France and at the „Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts” in Japan. In 2009, his monograph „After the Wall. Traces of the Soviet Empire” was published by the English Publisher Dewi Lewis.   THANKS TO SIA "PIECI EZERI", FRENCH INSTITUTE IN LATVIA, FINEARTPRINT AND DIENA FOR THEIR SUPPORT!