‘Restricted Areas’ Chronicles a Technological Future That Never Happened

Danila Tkachenko is a Russian visual artist and photographer who focuses on the unconventional. His project “Restricted Areas” zeroes in on abandoned Soviet buildings and installations. As he told Fast Company, “One day I went to visit my grandmother who lives in a closed and previously secret city near Chelybinsk, where the first Soviet nuclear bomb was developed.” That photo led him to create the entire series, which ranges from former residential buildings in a scientific polar town, to a tropospheric antenna and rocket engine production facility. As Tkachenko describes it, “I travel in search of places which used to have great importance for the technical progress—and which are now deserted. Those places lost their significance together with the Utopian ideology which is now obsolete. Secret cities that cannot be found on maps, forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came.” The entire series is filled with past visions of the future that were never realized and is as stunning as it is bleak.