The Druzhba project is an installation that explores the cultural, political, and geographical territories that unfold in a fictional journey along the world’s longest crude oil pipeline, stretching 4,000 kilometers from Siberia, through the Baltic States, into Eastern and Central Europe. Druzhba, or “friendship” in Russian, is a master signifier, a grand-narrating, imperial structure meant at its inception in 1960 to “lead the world into a new dawn”. The project’s psycho-geographic readings reveal mechanisms of power and submission that rightfully belong to the past but still persist even today.

Commissioned by Gediminas Urbonas, I conducted extensive research at the Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive of Ukraine. The methodology involved distilling an initial longlist of 468 catalog entries down to a strict shortlist of 293 positions, spanning both 35mm and 16mm film formats. By cross-referencing the archive's editing decision lists, we isolated 20 core documents. I physically reviewed the original reels on the editing table before executing their 4K digitization.