A modern metropolis dominated by monumental Stalinist architecture— the city of Minsk has always exerted an inexplicable charm on each of its visitors. Through an intimate series of images, we confront the city’s absurdist, yet strangely poetic, atmosphere.
Although nearing 1,000 years of age, it is in the past decade that Minsk, the “Sun City of Dreams,” has truly begun to emerge from the Belarusian bogs and forests. Today, the rapidly changing city is the outcome of an ongoing project to create an ideal city from a lost communist utopia.
Yet the reality is that the project has been carried out with absurdist aesthetics and poetics, turning Minsk into nothing more than an imitation of a city of dreams. Still, I traveled there in search of what lay behind the original vision and how it is expressed today. It turns out that the city’s failings by no means detract from its uniqueness.
This series was shot during a visit of Minsk by invitation from the Minsk Goethe Institute and Minsk Photo Festival. My title was inspired by the book of Artur Klinau, “Minsk. The Sun City of Dreams”