Five Questions for... Yuri Segalerba
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By Sara Bellini:
These photos are taken by the series La Ciudad Nuclear by Yuri Segalerba. The Nuclear City is a semi-abandoned and never completed Cuban town built in the 1980s to house the families of the workers that were supposed to work in the new power plant. The Russians started constructions in Cuba following a bilateral agreement, but after the collapse of the USSR, they abandoned the project and its inhabitants.
Yuri Segalerba is an Italian photographer based in Berlin and Athens and published among others on Vice and art - das Kunstmagazin. His photography inhabits the liminal space between architecture and sociology and has a focus on abandoned places, geometric shapes and the personal and collective stories behind a place. At the moment he’s working on an ongoing project about Russian suburbs and a social reportage in Egypt.
What does home mean to you?
I have been asking myself for a long time and I think home is the place where I have a family (a biological family or a chosen one) waiting for me. I realised this after years living in Berlin, when I finally found myself living with friends that I consider family and I started saying “I’m going home” not only when I was going to Genoa but also when I was coming back to Berlin.
Which place do you have a special connection to?
I’ll answer without even thinking about it: Havana, Buenos Aires and Russia in general. (You’ll also want to know why I assume…) Havana and Buenos Aires are connected to my work as a photographer, because they’re two extremely cinematographic cities. Each corner is a photo and when I go to these cities I always come back with hard discs full of material - more or less good, but always very inspiring.
Buenos Aires feels like a home away from home. I usually arrive there at the end of long periods of being in South America and getting there means breathing European air again, to me it’s the link between Europe and South America. Let’s not forget that a lot of the people there have Italian ancestry, and I often meet third-generation immigrants from my city, Genoa, so I connect Buenos Aires with the feeling of home in South America.
With Russia I don’t know, it’s a more visceral feeling. Maybe I’ve developed this interest because of my name, which I didn’t fully understand as a kid (I don’t have Russian origins, my parents are not communists and they don’t particularly love Space, so it was a random choice). Russia is an incredibly vast and unknown country, very closed-off, with a consistent language and geographical barrier. I think I’m attracted to its inaccessible and unexplored sides, the nationalism of its inhabitants, this complex culture isolated from external influences, their cinema, their architecture...
What is beyond your front door?
Oh god, that’s such a difficult question! When you say “beyond”, am I inside or outside? Is it a physical or a meta-physical door? If it’s a physical one, which one is my door to me? Because I’m not so sure about it...
What place would you most like to visit?
All of them! I usually feel a sudden urge to go to a specific place and I just go. Lately I’ve been feeling that it's time to go back to southern Africa for example… And then there are places like Havana and Buenos Aires where since the first visit, when I was leaving them I was already thinking “I’m definitely coming back”. Every time I went back, I found myself thinking the same thing. And then Siberia...
What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?
Reading: Chernobyl Prayer, written by the Belarusian Nobel Laureate Sviatlana Alieksijevič who met and interviewed the people that were living in Chernobyl at the time of the catastrophe in 1986.
Watching: A lot of movies, especially Russian movies, I really like Andrey Zvyagintsev, but lately I've started paying attention to Iranian cinema, it’s a window on a world that fascinates me and that I don’t know at all.
Listening: A bit of everything… Maybe it’s better if I don’t answer this, I’m a bit ashamed of myself!
Looking: Right now I’m in Genoa, so I’m taking this as an opportunity to look at the sea from my window, before coming back to the Spree.
