RENA EFFENDI – OIL VILLAGE
Oil Village tells the story of people trapped in a polluted environment and urban decay of the overpopulated city of Baku in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. This project is dedicated to my father Rustam Effendi, formerly an environmental activist and an entomologist who dedicated his life to studying, hunting and collecting over 90,000 butterfly species in Soviet Union. Inherited by the state after his death, Effendi’s life’s work, his collection of butterflies is now disintegrating due to lack of preservation. The only remaining visual evidence of his work is – fifty photographs of endangered butterflies for a book that he never had a chance to publish. Oil Village combines the images of my father’s butterflies contrasting in their perfection with the pictures of chaotic and hazardous urban environment. Here, butterflies also serve as metaphors for the fragility of nature set aside the hardness of human condition.
This post is also available in: Turkish
English
Türkçe