'The true picture of the past'

2023

The foundation of this zine is a quote from Walter Benjamin’s essay On the Concept of History, where time is not seen as a linear progression of progress but as a piling up of ruins over which the Angel of History hovers. This narrative intertwines with images from the 1969 issues of Vokrug Sveta—a year that saw the convergence of disparate yet defining events: the assassination attempt on Brezhnev and humanity’s first landing on the Moon. To this, I add the Bayer designation star catalog—a system that constructs an image of celestial order, seemingly stable but only within the limits of human perception.

In this project, I use visual montage as a method of disrupting chronology, creating an accordion-style zine where historical fragments overlap and form paradoxical connections. I am interested in how unrelated elements acquire a new internal logic within a single narrative space and how this principle mirrors the very nature of history—not linear and complete, but fragmented, cyclical, moving not forward but toward repetition and breakdowns. In this entanglement of signs, there is a sense that modernity exists not as the culmination of progress but as a point of tension where time endlessly circles back to its own collapse.

The zine unfolds into a poster. 

Edition of 20
Self-publishing
Russian language