Strict control is built on distancing oneself from the actual shooting, on delegation: "I find it hard to call myself a photographer in the classical sense. I would not say I like to take pictures; my assistant often does it for me. Much more time and effort are taken by what is not in the frame: the expedition logistics of exploration, equipping and installation. The artist states its centrality to the creative process: "My practice is based on site-specific interventions in space. The main part of the work is research, exploring the context, gathering information, constructing an itinerary, finding fixers and assistants. This is followed by finding materials, organizing participants, researching presumptive locations, and resolving transportation issues. The final stage is travel, physical site preparation, creating the installation, waiting out the weather conditions, documentation, and cleanup. Most of my projects are done according to this scheme. The Mannequins project has extensive geography, covering much of the Russian north. I have been working on this project for over two years. At the same time, I was doing the Planetarium project, addressing abandoned towns in the far north. I researched former Gulag camps; they are not listed on maps and are in remote and inaccessible places. In order to get to the place, I outfitted a series of expeditions, enlisting the help of locals. They were mostly snowmobiles with trailers to transport materials for the installations. Transportation became the most costly part of producing the project. Once I was able to get to the locations, I would find a suitable place to install the installations, which consisted of light prefabricated mannequins covered with black cloth, arranging them in different orders. I made several approaches to the layouts to accomplish the photographic documentation. One of the challenges was the weather conditions. The wind needed not to be strong enough to blow the installations away, so sometimes we had to wait or return to the site again."
Mapping is inextricably intertwined with intervention. The anxiety of its violence is heightened by the fact that the invasion is carried out in the discourse of memory and the topos of the Gulag, what scholar Alexander Etkind called "crooked grief" from the obsession of the unmourned, the non-encounter with the irrationality of suicidal mass destruction
[4]. The reference to the Gulag goes back at least to Heroes (2019), when Tkachenko borrowed from memorial NPOs the remains they discovered in large numbers in unmarked graves and photographed the bones painted in bright colours - an almost literal hauntology of the macabre, staging the sadism of the unacceptable. As with escapist movements, for the author, the history of political repression is linked to family history, extended from private experience into the public - into the ghostly ether of post-communism pervasive unquietness: "For me, the subject of the Gulag is personal, as it is for much of the population of post-Soviet countries. My family has repressed ancestors, as do many families. We know little about them because it was not customary to talk about them for fear of the authorities. This non-outspokenness brings fear back to the present day and permeates the post-Soviet space with hauntology.
In an interview with his regular critic Anna Komissarova, Tkachenko mentioned "Heroes" about the unburied that his work addresses the reproach left by their obsession[5].
How can the unburied from the past work in contemporary art? At least in two registers: on the one hand, reconciliation, giving the appearance of victims; on the other, mimesis of violence on a symbolic level, as a provocation of inhumanity. The first register in art and cultural production in general dominates, a remarkable example of which is Anastasia Vepreva's[6] graphic art and papier-mache; Tkachenko, in his characteristic mode of detached cruelty, chooses the second. Suppose the burning of the ruins in "Homeland" is an extreme expression of this negativist. In that case, nihilistic impulse - destruction, and "Heroes" with its painting in bright luminescence of human remains is irreverent, then in "Mannequins" this impulse is blunted, for it deals with the landscape and not the ghostly traces of people, their bodies, which here are transformed into icons, statistically insignificant figures, flashed into the ground, to soon vanish from it.
Not just adding to the discourse of memory, but transforming it from within can be a critical reflection on its relationship to imperialism - more simply, decolonization of memory is needed. The Gulag was both an industrial-scale terror against dissent and an imperialist complex of evictions, artificial hunger, the reclaiming of territory, the neutralization of difference, and the clearing of it for the Eurocentric politics of white supremacy. The task of this recognition is still just beginning to illuminate from behind the horizon of critical futurity the current aesthetic and literary efforts.