The Potemkin Village

The British Journal of Photography,04/2017, Interview by

Izabela Radwanska

Zhang.





The purpose of a ‘Potemkin village’ is to

deceive. Taking its name from an apocryphal

Russian tale, it is a town that is built solely

to create the illusion that circumstances are

better than they actually are. Gregor Sailer,

an Austria-based designer and photographer,

has taken this concept and interpreted it “with

a wider angle”, travelling to all corners of the

world to explore how and why these villages

have come to exist in contemporary society.

The series stems from Sailer’s Closed

Cities project, which won him international

recognition, and both look at how architecture

reflects social or political changes in any given

place. “But I didn’t just want to do Volume 2

of Closed Cities,” he says. “I was interested in

showing a new world, a new picture language

and a new atmosphere to outsiders. I’m more

interested in the science of human beings than

in the human beings themselves.”

Sailer’s project partites into three

chapters, as it will in a book published by

Kehrer Verlag this autumn. The first looks at

the pastiche European hamlets built on the

outskirts of Shanghai, China – commuter

towns located too far from the metropolis,

never occupied and which still stand deserted.

The next chapter looks at cities that were

never meant to be lived in. Spending time with

the US, British, French and German armies,

Sailer photographed artificial cities created

for military training, encountering Afghanstyle

villages in California’s Mojave desert

and Cold War relics in Europe.

Finally, he visited Suzdal, northeast

of Moscow, where shabby buildings were

covered in “charming” printed canvases to

hide the town’s decay from a visiting Vladimir

Putin. Perhaps the most poignant assimilation

of a Potemkin village is in the very place where

the idea was born more than 200 years ago.

Despite the varied locations, Sailer has

controlled his aesthetic by adding another

layer of illusion, all the while working in large

format analogue film. “It’s important that

there is a harmony between the series and

the topic itself. It was not coincidence, it was

criteria,” he says. “If you change the titles, you

can’t distinguish between the pictures; you

only know there and then where the picture

was taken – it’s a game of illusion and reality.”

Sailer’s first solo exhibition opens in

Innsbruck in November, before heading to

Vienna and Hamburg. He plans to persevere

with his curiosity about restricted areas by

working with the European Space Agency, as

well as trying to get behind the doors of the

most peculiar research facilities. “I don’t know

if they’ll let me in. But it’s always difficult, and

somehow I’ve managed. So I will manage this

as well.”