How does power inscribe itself into the landscape—and how do we read that inscription once its authority has faded?

In 2013, I participated in an artist-in-residence program on Kotlin Island—better known as Kronstadt—just off the coast of St. Petersburg, Russia. Once a symbol of both revolutionary spirit and authoritarian control, Kronstadt is layered with contradictions. It was here in 1921 that sailors, workers, and soldiers rose up against Lenin’s Bolshevik regime—an uprising that was violently crushed and later erased from official Soviet memory.

For decades, Kronstadt remained a closed military zone, the main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Its massive forts, sea walls, and barracks bore silent witness to both imperial power and Soviet isolationism. Civilian access was forbidden. Today, that boundary between the military and the civilian is in flux. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the island has slowly opened up to civilians and tourists. In the ruins of once-strategic structures, wildflowers grow. Old military buildings are abandoned, collapsing, or quietly repurposed.

During my residency, I wandered through this contested terrain—documenting spaces where militarised infrastructure meets civilian life. My camera became a way to trace what lingers and what fades: former checkpoints turned into parking lots; lookout towers overlooking family picnics; walls once designed to repel, now tagged with graffiti. Besides a photographic archive of these observations, I created two videoworks that observe former symbols of power and heroïsm as objects in need of a new meaning in a new, civic context.