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Vladimir Arkhipov

205x125 mm hardback
304 pages
ISBN 978-1-9162184-7-5
Published in 2022

10% goes to the British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the ongoing conflict has led to widespread sanctions being imposed on Russia. As the effects of these measures begin to take hold, the lives of ordinary Russian people will be subject to the type of austerity they last endured over 30 years ago, following the collapse of the USSR.

This reprinted edition of Home-Made (2006) features over 220 individual artefacts of Soviet culture, made by former Soviet citizens as their country crumbled around them. Each item, borne of necessity, is accompanied by a photograph of the creator, their story of how the object was conceived, its function and the materials used to create it.

Vladimir Arkhipov: ‘I have always considered my project to be humanistic and anti-Putin. It exists contrary to the imperialist cultural policy of Russia.’

Reviews

Each of these objects is personal, and has a personality, a story. In an age of in-built obsolescence there’s something very radical in that.
Owen Hatherley, Tribune


Back to the USSR: will Russian products be like this after Western sanctions?

Home Made Russia is a project, a book, that looks at the past and asks questions about Russia's present and future.
Publico


Reviews of the 2006 edition:

Nothing is as it seems in Home-Made. All the artefacts are the products of need, not design, in a country where for decades many essential items have been impossible to come by.
The Guardian

There may be no better document of the phenomenon of the hand-made object than Home-Made.
Frieze

Home-Made achieves something unmatched by few conventional histories – a vivid and moving picture of real life behind the Iron Curtain.
The Telegraph

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