Cosmic Building Photographs by Frédéric Chaubin

Text: Levente Polyák

Druskininkai Szanatórium, Litvánia, photo: Frédéric Chaubin

After the downfall of the Berlin Wall an inspiring field of research was offered to a whole generation of post-socialist landscape artists. While looking for surprising informal urban situations or worn visions of the future many have viewed the objects of socialism as purely aesthetic phenomena: removing them from their context, approaching them as art pieces or semi-folk art handicraft products. Others searched for the imprints of ideological systems or social tendencies in them. Of the objects embodying and symbolizing the heritage of socialism buildings somehow excel: in the past few years not only architects, but also artists and photographers have paid more attention to the everyday and unique man-made landscape bearing the marks of the authoritarian regime. However, of all the photographers who made the unknown architectural treasures of Eastern Europe surface in the past few decades it was most obviously the French Frédéric Chaubin who focussed on buildings built on the margins of the former Soviet Union characterized as „eccentric”. He is one of the most thorough researchers of the previously invisible architecture of socialism.