In search of beauty

Minsk, Belarus. 2016

1. Łukasz Woleński (PL)

2. Alexandra Strashinskaya (BY)

3. Nilüfer Karanfil (TR)

4. Veronika Karchmit (BY)

5. Aliaksandra Korotkevich (BY)

6. Grigor Nalchajyan (ARM)

7. Pavel Yurkevich (BY)

8. Vladimir Andjelich (BY)

I just came back to Finland from the most intense week in SESAM 2016 Terra Incognita (Small European Students of Architecture Meeting) in Minsk, Belarus where I tutored my own workshop called ‘The Essence of Terra Incognita’. The theme of the SESAM was ‘Terra Incognita’ implying exploration and discoveries, fresh impressions and cultural exchange on the city and the country that are still mostly unknown to people outside of Belarus. The aim of my workshop was to capture the essence of Terra Incognita, or in this case, Minsk.

Many of us visited Minsk – and Belarus – for the first time and thus had fresh eyes and curious minds for the city. During the first week of May my participants Vladimir Andjelich (BY), Nilüfer Karanfil (TR), Veronika Karchmit (BY), Aliaksandra Korotkevich (BY), Pavel Yurkevich (BY), Grigor Nalchajyan (ARM), Alexandra Strashinskaya (BY), Łukasz Woleński (PL), and me, explored Minsk and documented what we saw with photos and audio recordings. Through spontaneous photography we could show what we saw in Terra Incognita, what we thought was vital to this city and what caught our eye.

Documenting and analysing Minsk through spontaneous photography helped to capture various atmospheres essential to Terra Incognita and was also a great way to explore the city. Spontaneity was achieved by using disposable cameras and polaroid cameras, both of which support spontaneous photography but in different ways. With these kind of cameras one starts photographing intuitively and spontaneously, not thinking too much about the method but of the overall atmospheres. In addition to taking photographs we recorded soundscapes of the city and built a Camera Obscura pavilion to isolate a living landscape from it’s usual surroundings, to make the local people look at a familiar landscape in a new light.