Hiding from Baba Yaga

„Vasilisa was running faster than she had ever run before. Soon she could hear the witch, Baba Yaga’s mortar bumping on the ground behind her. Desperately, she remembered the thin black cat’s words and threw the towel behind her on the ground. The towel grew bigger and bigger, and soon a deep, broad river stood between the little girl and Baba Yaga. And Baba Yaga the witch, the bony-legged one, gnashing her teeth and screaming with rage and disappointment, finally turned round and drove away back to her little hut on hen’s legs.“

From time immemorial people have sought protection and freedom on the banks of the Yenisei and the adjacent wild taiga. For a long time, the banks of the Yenisei have been pervaded by nomadic peoples.

The Russians, coming from the west, chased by the greed for valuable fur, did not reach the river until 1607. Criminals, escaped serfs, apostates or simply adventurers, joined together in wild rider associations and expanded ever deeper into the vast wild Taiga. The life of the settlers in Siberia was free and self-determined for the time. Old believers settled on lonely banks of the Yenisei to escape the persecution of the Tsar and later the Soviets.

With Stalin the Yenisei became a place of exile and forced labor. The Soviets not only chained the native peoples, but also the Yenisei. With two giant dams they created lakes of almost 400km length. Villages sank in the water, the climate changed. A dense fog swept over the river.

The USSR is history. Today, most people are drawn to big cities like Moscow or St Petersburg. Therefore the Yenisei turns more and more into a space for dreamers and loners to escape the worldly world.

Encountering all this different people, there is a bond which connects them with each other. The seek of freedom, protection, imprisonment and isolation. The Yenisei and its woods become a metaphor of a dreamscape: Loneliness, unfulfilled dreams, death, abandoned hopes shape people as much as the vast nature, which at the same time gives so much freedom and places of retreat.

Having learnt from my recent travel I want to take on this journey and photograph along the northern part of the river. More than half of the year, the Yenisei is frozen. Only in the summer months a mail ship connects the individual settlements from Krasnoyarsk to northern city Dudinka, next to the arctic ocean. In winter the only way of transportation is a snow mobile or a helicopter. Far from civilization people live completely on their own. Forcibly resettled under Stalin, most of the people have returned to more pleasant climate zones today. What kind of people still withstand the difficult living conditions in the far north?

Hunters and people longing for loneliness and wilderness?

I wish to go back during the coldest months and explore the northern region and connect with its people and explore their lives.