ZorChai

What I’m looking for during my travels is some abandoned buildings. The ones that used to be very popular restaurants or huge manufacturing factories with strong capacity. What attracts me in those places is may the same with what attracts archeologist in their excavating. I’m not looking for any treasures but I always find some. My biggest treasure I found in Kyrgyzstan, Osh province. It was a place which was abandoned twice. First it was a textile factory, which used to be the biggest in the city during the USSR. Walking through all the factory sections, observing working places, storages with some stuff left, offices with desks containing documents dated on 50th I came across with a room next to aid station, which was apparently an admission room. The room wasn’t fitting the whole building at all. Tubes and bottles of dried paints and brushes were indisputable evidences of an artist’s presence. My conclusion was that some artist used this place as his workshop. Now it was abandoned, but everything in the room seemed to be waiting for its master. I’ve got a feeling that he just disappeared one day. All the walls were arranged with grotesques enormous and tiny, in each corner there was an atlant or a caryatid, on each side there was at least one column. Each peace and each detail was unique. Distances and margins have been not respected,he didn’t try to arrange the room with a well balanced composition of copies of ancient greek and roman art, but tried each style and filled every empty space on walls and ceiling. Pure essence of baroque in its triumph mixed with eccentric character of the creator. He experimented, he was searching. All the columns were different, some belonged to ionic order, some to Greek and Roman korinthos order. The room was full of different sculptures unfinished or damaged by vandals, but still recognizable: like a «boy playing with a goose» by Boethus. For the one who did it all the place was not only a workshop, but sort of home. What a cinematic scene: an old mattress, surrounded with empty bottles of vodka, sharpen coals and sketches. The place is so much related to one person, once you’re there you feel like an intruder.