honorable mention
Anita Licis-Ribak spain
title
Where Land Comes to an End. Postal Code 678830
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entry description
The project focuses on the closed fading settlement of Chersky in the far Northeast corner of Russian Arctic, where I lived as a teenager in 1980s. After almost 30 years, I returned to Chersky in December of 2014, to work on this personal project. Chersky, originally founded as part of Gulag’s forced labor camp network, became an important scientific, industrial and military town during the soviet times. It was Chersky that gave me my first insight into the worlds of Bach and the Beatles, Tintoretti and Rockwell Kent, Tolstoy and Dreiser... It made me and my classmates dream of big bright futures. Today, with few resources, growing isolation and very little support from the government, the few people still living in the town, are trapped without prospect of relocation or growth. I ask myself: what is their connection to the past, what keeps them anchored, and what fuels their passion for life…about the photographer
Anita Līcis-Ribak is an artist and photographer currently based in Barcelona, Spain. She studied architecture and design at the Urban Studies Architecture Institute of Verona Italy, received Masters degree in Interior Architecture from University of Massachusetts, USA, a BA in Architecture from Rīga Technical University in Latvia, as well as a Fine Arts diploma in Painting from Chersky School of Fine Arts, Russia. She has studied photography with a number of master photographers at the Maine Media Workshops in the United States, and at GrisArt and IEFC in Barcelona, Spain.back to gallery