Post-Soviet Leisure
Leisure means “free time”. It is the time free from work, but it is also the time free for…Free for what? For doing nothing? “Leisure” is the opposite of “work”. Yet it is also a creative period. If working time is dedicated to the production of goods, then leisure time produces “bads”.
The strange chronotope of leisure has no guiding orientation: nothing forces us to produce goods. We are free to choose our own goals, and we are free to not to achieve them. Caught in-between choice and its non-fulfillment, the decadent post-Soviet nothingness now enjoys its leisure era.
In this collection, I explore the “bads” that we produce during the free time we were suddenly given after the collapse of eternity – an eternity that was once called Soviet Union. We got time back to each of us. What did we do with it? How did we cope with the newly found extra time of leisure? The answer is evident. In these pictures, I mean.
Mykhailo Minakov (1971) teaches Contemporary Philosophy at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He is interested in photography as another way to philosophize in the visual era.