Red Thistle, 2011
The mountain range stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea traces the restless, misunderstood mosaic of the Northern Caucasus, which features in the media predominantly when the endless sporadic wars turn into massacres or genocides. From Chechnya, South Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, to Dagestan… Davide Monteleone has travelled for several years across the North Caucasian states, an inaccessible and inhospitable land, enclosed between two seas. This region, largely impacted by the URSS fall, became an object of major geostrategic issues. During four years, he has testified the way the conflicts and the disruptions of the XXth century have haunted a region already deeply divided by ethnical and religious divergences.
In “Red Thistle”, he shares the local people’s life and reveals in a same movement these men and women history, and behind it, the Caucasian one. Between daily life, reminiscence of private tragedies and memory of collective dramas, his photographs reflect the difficulty in keeping living normally when borders are still unstable and the trauma still vivid.
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