Anthro notes. Ideas for the future: Severobaikalsk
I am looking in the direction of Baikal Lake. It has villages around. I've been to one Buryat village in 2006. It's not a tourist place. Maybe I can, during my projected fieldwork, spend in some Baikal village or town a month or two, and it will provide insights into how specific versus common the situation in Anosovo is for the village that is near a massive water reservoir.
The Angara River takes its source from Baikal, so it is not entirely unreasonable or implausible to make a connection. Baikal Lake is the lake of the planetary importance, and people definitely think "Baikal" when they think "Siberia," and they will continue wondering about Baikal for centuries as about the source of drinking water and a major treasure in the situation when the Anthropocene transformed the planet so much the climate change threatens to deplete us from the resources that we got used to taking for granted.
On Baikal Lake, there is the town of Severobaikalsk, which at one point had a factory polluting water. Then, through many efforts of ecologists and advocates for the future of Baikal (including Valentin Rasputin), the factory was shut down. That left people without stable jobs and resources. That is to say, the situation is close to what Anosovo found itself in, only on a bigger scale in terms of the population affected. This again boils down to the first inspiration behind our project: post-Soviet ruins, and to the second idea as well, that of mobility and people deciding to move away / stay put. Together, again, ruins and mobility are connected to affect because affect influences decisions that are made in the unfolding ruins.
