City of the Sun
artistic research
2024 — present.
work in progress
“City of the Sun, ” is one of the first utopias envisioning an ideal society was written by Tommaso Campanella in prison. In Russia, the “Sunny City” often refers to Magadan, the capital of the Kolyma region—a place deeply tied to the collective catastrophe of totalitarianism and mass repression, the memory of which remains marginalized in collective consciousness and official history. This deliberate forgetting led to the collapse of my personal utopia of the City of the Sun.
Three generations of my family lived in Kolyma. The first two moved here voluntarily for work. My parents were born here, grew up, married, and left Magadan with me already growing in my mother’s womb. On the “mainland, ” I grew up on their stories of their homeland, full of love, which shaped my utopian vision of Magadan—a city of bright family memories, nestled between the sea and the breathtaking northern nature.
Later, on my own, I discovered the history of Magadan, which turned this utopia inside out.
The Kolyma region is considered one of the main centers of political repression during the Soviet era. This is embodied in the labor camps of the GULAG system, which existed in the mid-20th century and claimed the lives of approximately 2 million people. The real landscape of Kolyma is scarred by the search for gold, tin, and uranium, filled with ruins and ghosts of the past.
This confronting transformed me, and providing a unique lens at the intersection of personal and collective memory. I traveled to Kolyma in search of answers and images capable of bridging the gap between the idealization and demonization of history. In Magadan, alongside my parents—who returned for the first time in 26 years—I navigated through the mirages of childhood utopias, the reality of the modern city, and along the legendary Kolyma Highway to the ruins of GULAG camps.
This journey through the northern heart of darkness became the starting point for my search for a language that enables a meaningful dialogue about an Inconvenient heritage —a language to address questions of individual responsibility toward the past, present, and a future that now seems so uncertain.
In Magadan and other remote regions of the Russian Far East, the rest of Russia is referred to as the “mainland” due to geographical isolation. Magadan is located on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, surrounded by mountains and inaccessible territories. It can only be reached by air, sea, or the perilous Kolyma Highway, which creates a sense of detachment from the “mainland.” This historically rooted expression emphasizes both the physical and cultural distance between the region and the central part of the country. According to another version, the first prisoners brought by ship, after weeks at sea, believed they had been landed on a large island.
