Robin Tutenges – On Asphalt We Grow

“Ukraine is like a prison you can’t get out of, and Kyiv is my cell. Only skateboarding allows me to escape.” This sentence, uttered in the summer of 2023 by twenty-five-year-old skateboarder Aleksandr Burchak, sums up the stagnation in which Ukrainian youth finds itself. Photographed with a silver camera from the 1990s (XPan), this work by Robin Tutenges reveals the dead time of a war that shattered Europe in the winter of 2022. It’s a step sideways, abandoning the litany of breaking news to show how the conflict reconfigures everyday life, right down to its most trivial aspects. Here, skateboarding is more than just an unusual way of talking about a brutally confiscated youth: the figures of these teenagers appear as an act of resistance and creativity in the face of the violence imposed by Russia. The panoramic format, similar to the dimensions of a skateboard, represents this reduced horizon, where the board is now the only opening: for the time of a few tricks, those who could be soldiers escape gravity. This photographic series was supported by the Centre national des arts plastiques ( Cnap), as part of the “Performance” national photographic commission.

This 100-copies self-published booklet, bound with two black staples, plays with the panoramic format, using multiple flaps and folds to accentuate the composition of the images. The title is set in Tempel Softland, the introduction in Minotaur Sans, and all other texts (captions, comments, imprint) in Yorick, using its Cyrillic characters. 32 pages and 36 fold-out flaps, 110×200 mm. Photographs by Robin Tutenges, editorial and graphic design by Théo Miller.