When I enter decaying modernist buildings of former Soviet hospitals, I feel a special kind of fear: like in my childhood, in my grandma's country yard, peering into the dark bottom of deep well. As I had been told by my parents, a monster lived there.
Modernist external form of state hospitals, medical scientific and research institutes (NII) and polyclinics in Kyiv often results in odd and complicated internal structure - buildings have several entrances that implicate into labyrinth from stairs and dark corridors with dead ends and dark corners. Cracks in walls and outdated furniture in areas that survived renovation emphasize the feeling of frozen time and horror that embraces inside. Old things carry the memory of pain, sorrow, despair, suspense, boredom, hope, salvation, fear of death... These feelings are captured in scratches on furniture, dirty laundry, invisible fingerprints on instruments - in everything that carries experience of doctors and patients touching them, curing with them or being cured by them.
I started document architecture of Soviet hospitals and medical design of Soviet times around 10 years ago. Some of buildings today are renovated (like facade of the building at Smirnova-Lastochkina street in Kyiv), equipment is partly replaced, instruments are disposable. I did most of shots as a patient of a hospital, either a guest of a patient, thus they transfer rather an experience of being a Soviet patient that being estranged document. For this reason I use the metaphor of well at the beginning of the text, as long as I consider the project as an attempt to look into the world of unknown (as a medicine overall, a science about life and death, as a certain historical period of Soviet that almost do not remember – Soviet Union broke up when I was 7 years old).
Soviet medicine for sure had its own ideology and socialist philosophy, as long as medicine is always a significant part of state ideology: the notion of health and norm is directly connection to requirements from a system to an ordinary citizen. In Soviet times “enemies of a nation” were locked to mental hospitals and concentration camps, where they were treated from wrong political views, in this way being deprived from right of having life, not even health. At the same time ordinary citizens received diverse and extremely progressive for that time system of public health that was free of charge. It is still not common for many EU countries to have polyclinics – like hospitals they are centralized institutions with many doctors, but people come there just to visit a doctor for a consultation, get checked and get manipulations after which they are able to go back home like dental health, injections, putting a bandage, massages and so on. Every citizen at least in cities is fixed to a particular policlinics, where he or she is treated for free. At Soviet times private doctors did not exist and it is still so – today there are private health care in Ukraine, but it almost never has a single doctor, and very rarely offers just one type of service, being rather a small private policlinics than private practice office of a particular doctor.