The prison camps of Siberia still have customers, in fact over a million of them. Sent there for minor offensives such as stealing cabbages or even a hamster from a Moscow pet shop, the prisoners and their prisons are captured here by Carl de Keyser in brilliant colour, as if seen through some disturbing hallucinatory dream.
It's official. The gulags of Siberia are no more. Solzhenitsin's nightmare of the absurd does not exist. The prisons are still there, of course, with plenty of customers, probably more than a million, such as the 15-year-old boy serving three and a half years for stealing two hamsters from a Moscow pet shop, or the mother of four who stole 12 cabbages - what can have possessed her? - and was rewarded with four years in Siberia.
“During the summer of 2000 and 2001 and the winter of 2001-2002, I stayed 6-7 months in Krasnoyarsk - Russia visiting 40-50 different prison camps, most of these former Gulags. With the help of friends and colleagues. Thanks to Sasha Kuznetsov, Larissa Tkachenko and Sasha Shubskaya.”
