North Line presents a collection of images through which Fyodor Telkov and Sergey Poteryaev document their travels in the regions of northern Russia to chronicle the lives of the native Mansi, Selkup, Nenets and Hanty people.

Recounting the complexity of an investigation between native cultures and the drama constituted by the gradual disappearance of ancient traditions in favour of new and inevitable processes of globalisation, the work of these two authors articulates the image of the inner landscape of a territory, a landscape that manages, despite the distance of the subjects, to touch us.

The Nordic landscape, characterised by a sharpness and wildness that make the narrative distinctive, is combined with images of portraits of people of different ages, professions and life stories. A repertoire of testimonies that is combined with yet more images, portraying dwellings, house interiors and still lifes, a collection of elements and signs that the authors collect to testify the complex transition from a rural life deeply bound to popular traditions to a transformation towards ‘modernity’.

By carefully and sensitively mapping the everyday, Fyodor Telkov and Sergey Poteryaev introduce us to a universe of signs, a landscape in which religious and cultural influences, traditional habits and modern lifestyle combine and work (sometimes failing) to materialise a new form, new signs and cultural expressions.

In North Line the two authors did an observation whose preciousness is not to be found exclusively in the subjects treated, but perhaps and above all in the manner in which the same observation was produced. A manner that among other things helps us to understand how complex and stratified the construction of an identity is.