Bermuda Triangle

Probably there is such a place in every major industrial city. A place full of determination to make you inferior, forcing you to suffocate or even to disappear. In my hometown of St. Petersburg there is such a place. There are two traffic arteries or, more accurately, the Obvodny Canal and the Obukhov Defense Prospect, which, if you look at the map, may well correspond to two sides of a triangle. And all three meeting points of the triangle belong to the River Neva.

This is the place through which you pass every time you drive from the so-called “sleeping” areas to the city center. Or maybe this place is not a place? Is it a certain border zone? In fact, in the old days the District of the Obvodny Canal was the outskirts of the city and enjoyed the notoriety of a mystical place. Regardless of such mystical glory, at the turn of the 21st century, the Bermuda Triangle ceased to function and, in a sense, many factories, cultural centers and even the Warsaw Railway Station disappeared. In the mid-19th century the Obvodny Canal was connected with the early Industrial Revolution in St. Petersburg and in Russia.

Now, when I’m working on my story, I do populate this place with ghosts – found photos of workers from a photographic lab of an abandoned rubber factory Red Triangle, which once was very successful and prosperous.

Ekaterina Vasilyeva (1977) is a Russian photographer based in St.Petersburg. She has had exhibitions in Russia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.