There are people who have minds that meticulously remember things that happened years ago – down to the specific wording, intonation, gesturing, and exactly which clothes everybody wore, or what the weather was like, or if the coffee had tasted good on that very morning. Then there are people who have a hard time even remembering how to spell their middle names – one of the reasons why I have chosen to go minimal on this one myself.
My memory is a syth, which is why I spend fortunes on books and also one of the resaons why I love photography, as a form of visual note taking.
Once in a while things grab me and I just know I need to keep them SOMEHOW – keep the memory, keep the feeling that went with it. Every event, like a christmas tree, is hanging full of interwoven and interlaced memories … So while I walk, I try to plant a trail of these trees along my path … in order not to forget.
While the Kursk drama unfolded, I was getting ready for my architecture diploma, getting ready for my first one man painting exhibition in a small museum, moving from a comfortable life into a menacing new environement, seeing my father very sick with enourmous fears of loosing him this early … When I see the Kursk images it all comes back to me: the smell of specific rooms in my old appartment, the colors of light and shadows on the walls, textures of food and fear in my mouth, the suffocating feeling, the pain in my stomach that prevented me from eating for 3 weeks, the sweat, the uncertainty of a future like a dark, massive wall in front of me, which was mirrored in the sickly greenish images of the broken tv screen – the online drama interwoven with my emotional and real life at that specific moment, not to ever be separated again.
Far, far away in the Barents Sea the Russian submarine K-141 Kurst sank, taking with it 118 lifes, leaving behind so much grief, disbelief and despair among people I have never met. And I, not seemingly connected with the drama, will never forget.
The project’s exhibition at the Bernd Slutzky Gallery:
The project’s merchandising:
“Kursk” is a non-profit project.
The Kursk Drama
Some definitions, facts and figures for your convenience:
The text below was extrakted from Wikipedia:
(Please visit Wikipedia for further links and information)
Russian submarine K-141 Kursk
K-141 Kursk was a Russian nuclear cruise missile submarine which was lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. Kursk, full name Атомная подводная лодка “Курск” [АПЛ "Курск"] in Russian, was a Project 949A Антей (Antey, Antaeus but was also known by its NATO reporting name of Oscar II. It was named after the Russian city Kursk, around which the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943. One of the first vessels built after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was commissioned into the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet.
Explosion
The Kursk sailed out to sea to perform an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at the Pyotr Velikiy, a Kirov class battlecruiser. On August 12, 2000 at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), the torpedoes were fired, but soon after there was an explosion on the Kursk. The only credible report to date is that this was due to the failure and explosion of one of the Kursk’s new torpedoes. The chemical explosion blasted with the force of 100-250 kg of TNT and registered 2.2 on the Richter scale. The submarine sank to a depth of 108 metres, about 135km (85 miles) from Severomorsk, at 69°40′ N, 37°35′ E. A second explosion 135 seconds after the initial event measured between 3.5 and 4.4 on the Richter scale, equivalent to 3-7 tons of TNT. One of those explosions blew large pieces of debris back through the submarine.
Rescue attempts
Though a rescue attempt was made by British and Norwegian teams, all sailors and officers aboard the Kursk perished. The Russian admiralty at first suggested that most of the crew had died within minutes of the explosion; however, their motivations for making the claim are considered by outside observers as political. Captain Lieutenant Dimitry Kolesnikov, one of the survivors of the first explosion, survived in Compartment 9 at the aft of the boat for hours after the blasts. Recovery workers found notes on his body. They showed that 23 sailors (out of 118 aboard) had waited in the dark with him. There has been much debate over how long the sailors might have survived. Some, particularly on the Russian side, say that they would have died very quickly; water is known to leak into a stationary Oscar-II craft through the propeller shafts and at 100m depth it would have been impossible to plug these. Others point out that the many potassium superoxide chemical cartridges, used to absorb carbon dioxide and chemically release oxygen to enable survival, were found used when the craft was recovered, suggesting that they had survived for several days. Ironically, these cartridges appear to have been the cause of death; a sailor appears to have accidentally brought a cartridge in contact with the sea water, causing a chemical reaction and a flash fire. The official investigation into the disaster showed that some men appeared to have survived the fire by plunging under the water (the fire marks on the walls indicate the water was at waist level in the lower area at this time). However the fire rapidly used up the remaining oxygen in the air, causing death by asphyxiation. While the tragedy of the Kursk played out in the Far North, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin waited for five days before he broke a holiday at his hideaway in subtropical Sochi on the Black Sea before commenting publicly on the loss of the pride of his Northern Fleet. In that time, he had found time to send birthday greetings to a well-known actress. A year later he said: “I probably should have returned to Moscow, but nothing would have changed. I had the same level of communication both in Sochi and in Moscow, but from a PR point of view I could have demonstrated some special eagerness to return.”
Raising
A Dutch team using the barge Giant 4 eventually raised the Kursk and recovered the dead, who were buried in Russia – although three of the bodies were too badly burned to be identified. The heat generated by the first blast detonated the warheads on 4 torpedoes causing a series of blasts big enough to be measured on geological seismic sensors in the area – and those secondary explosions fatally damaged the vessel. Russian officials strenuously denied claims that the sub’s Granit cruise missiles were carrying nuclear warheads, and no-one has been able to provide any evidence to the contrary. When a salvage operation raised the boat in 2001, there were considerable fears that moving the wreck could trigger explosions since the bow was cut off in the process using a diamond-studded cable which had the potential to cause sparks which would ignite remaining pockets of volatile gases, such as hydrogen. The remains of the Kursk’s reactor compartment was towed to Sayda Bay on Russia’s northern Kola Peninsula – where more than 50 reactor compartments were afloat at pier points – after a shipyard had defuelled the boat in early 2003. The rest of the boat was then dismantled.
Back to projects
