A strategic pole for the mining and metallurgical industry far from everything and everyone, in the Siberian vastness.
Born during the period of consolidation of the Soviet totalitarian utopia, Norilsk was built during the 1930s and 1940s by the prisoners of its Gulag in inhuman conditions of extreme cold and hunger.
Having become the main center of the Norilsk Nickel company, world leader in the production of nickel and palladium, the Russian city is today one of the ten most polluted urban contexts in the world. Unhealthy air, gray sky, climate that paralyzes.
For nine months of the year, streets and buildings are swallowed by a bubble of frost.
Temperatures can drop to around 50 below zero and for weeks the city is captured by the polar night, with the sun never reaching the horizon. Everything that is everyday, here, becomes difficult, very difficult. The life of the inhabitants of Norilsk – their daily struggle – is the protagonist of Days of Night – Nights of Day, the first solo show in Italy of documentary photographer Elena Chernyshova, born in Moscow in 1981. Her reportage is animated by the desire to investigate the adaptability of man in conditions of isolation, compromised ecological balance and extreme climate, and will be on display at the C | E CONTEMPORARY gallery in Milan, with opening Thursday 11 April, until 5 October.
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