French photographer Céline Clanet invites us to discover a secret place — the Kola Peninsula, Russia also known as Murmansk Oblast, or Russian Lapland.
The project is an outcome of Céline’s five-year exploration of the land located at the northwesternmost point of Russia, bordered by the Barents Sea and the White Sea. The photographer was curiously observing this harsh land, where the two-month dark winter and year-long polar weather. Nevertheless, from this seemingly miserable picture, beautiful and sensual visual story emerges.
KOLA is an ancient promise, a Great North Utopia: Sámi people settled here thousands of years ago, to live nomadically with their reindeer herds, and are trying nowadays to maintain their identity. Other people came here, from all parts of Russia, in order to build their destiny and domesticate the russian Arctic.
"Partly inaccessible, either due to lack of infrastructure, military prohibitions or barrier of language, the secretive Peninsula nevertheless conceded to me the following images. I sank into the landscapes of this mysterious land, like a foot into a snow whose depth would not be known,” Céline describes the project with poetic words.
