In June 2014 the famous artist made a three-week long journey from Murmansk to Kirkenes and further along the Varanger Fjord to Vardø. Traveling toghether with former Director of the art curator group Pikene på Broen in Kirkenes Luba Kuzovnikova, he made stops at several different places along the way, made drawings of the most characteristic landmarks and took notes of facts and peculiarities of the places they visited.
The result is ‘A Journey from Murmansk to Kirkenes’, a unique and funny guide to the border-close areas of Russia and Norway. With sense for detail both in text and in his naivistic drawings, Florensky has made a book where both locals and visitors will find new and interesting facts about the region.
“I want to dedicate this book to Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov (by the way, not my favorite artists, but anyway!), who took practically the same route 120 years ago, in 1894, and also made drawings of everything on their way,” Florensky says in a postscript to the book.
The book, which has the full title ‘A Journey from Murmansk to Kirkenes including Teriberka, Titovka, Zapolyarny, Nickel, Borisoglebsk, Grense Jakobselv, Pasvik, Vardø, Vadsø, Bugøynes and Neiden’, continues a cycle of travelogues Florensky has made over the past few years. He has earlier published four illustrated travelogues called “Jerusalem ABC”, “Tbilisi ABC”, “St. Petersburg ABC” and “Voronezh ABC”. The books are all in 33 pages and contain illustrations of important places in the towns, one for each letter of the Russian alphabet.
Luba Kuzovnikova suggested that Florensky should make a similar book about the Barents Region. “The ABC format did not seem to suit the project, and I suggested slightly changing the rules of the game – ‘ABC’ turned into ‘journey’ and a horizontal format replaced vertical,” Florensky says.
Born in 1960, Alexander Florensky is a member of Mitki, the infamous underground art group in St Petersburg, Russia, which upset the establishment during the years leading up to Perestroika by challenging the then Soviet system and becoming celebrities in the process. Like other Mitki artists, Florensky began his career in the early 1980s as a painter, a draughtsman and a book illustrator. His subject matter was traditional, comprising, for example, landscapes, or in his Dutch-influenced still-lifes, a few objects: shells, a cup and a lemon. In the early 1990s, however, Florensky’s work underwent a radical shift as he turned to conceptual art, producing installations and objects.
