Eric LUSITO

Eric Lusito focuses on the links between order and chaos. In his first project "Traces of the Soviet empire" he addresses the way history is fabricated at the border of documentary and art photography.

Eric Lusito has travelled as an archaeologist and a collector throughout the former Soviet world fromEast GermanytoMongolia, fromPolandtoKazakhstan, in search of these former Soviet military bases that embodied the ambition and the might of theUSSRand his photographs are an extraordinary record.

Fascination for a collapsed civilisation shared with a true desire to discover sites hidden for so long, these sites of power are doomed to disappear in the course of time, final chapter being written in the history of this modern civilisation. The military departed but much else was just left behind.

In theSoviet Unionmore than elsewhere, the feeling of ?reality? was built upon ideological representations spun by the political system. This political power had the will and the mastery to harness the immense creative talent of Russian artists to rally society together with a totally new Soviet culture. For millions of workers throughout the world, sustained with the image of a ?country of bread and roses? their wait implied the building of a dream, but also the building of an inevitable lie caused by the gap between the Eden created by propaganda and the daily reality.

These images question us through photography, a technical process used to present reality, the nature of decay, a physical process of disintegration and lastly politics, a mental process of manipulation. They make us think about the role of art and therefore that of the artist. There are many ways of reading and re-reading this work.