Fetish-frames №1

While doing a residency in Rotterdam in 2008, I shot and self-developed these images, a tourist’s dream of Holland – views of windmills: important technological and industrial achievements of the past, impractical but inseparable part of the city landscape nowadays.
The images were shot on outdated Soviet color film Svema, long time discontinued and expired, and developed in the chemistry of Fuji Film, which, once a big player on a film market, is moving towards video. They came out solarized and thus got this glamorous beauty of film media, unpredictable, chaotic and liberating.
One can marvel and adore them as well as fetishize them longing for “the passing epoch” of Celluloid Cinema and free-experimentation. The film’s frame is turned into a fetish object – as once working windmills are now turned into a fetish of tourist attraction and memorabilia depicted on postcards, frozen into snapshots and stamped on ceramic teapots holds.