STATEMENT OF INVESTIGATION

The gulag system has left a void in the Russian consciousness, something they desperately want to forget. It’s something they’ve never been forced to come to terms with because in its final days of formal existence it was wiped from the face of the earth. A manufactured forgetting was put into place by the former USSR. Did it really disappear though? In contemporary Russia we’ve begun to see yet another uptick in political incarceration due to the nature of the ongoing Russo-Ukraine war. Who’s to say the people politically imprisoned from this won’t be forgotten just like those of the gulag system. Memorializing human suffering in Russia has always gone through the state resulting in insufficient spaces of grieving. How do you create a memorial system that fits within the bounds of the modern Russian Federation yet still discusses the difficulty that is the brutality of the Russian method of incarceration.