A couple of days ago my trusted Landcruiser and I reached the Russian border with Finland on a small road on the eastern side. Sure enough within minutes the Finnish border police arrived. I tried in advance of my Baltic adventure to get a Russian visa to visit St Petersburg which is only a two hour drive from the spot where this image is taken. But for reasons unknown Russia don't have good relations with Denmark, so instead I tried to see if anything was possible on the ground, but the authorities said 'no'. Such a shame not being able cross the border and visit the great city of St Petersburg, especially as almost 20% of all Jersey ships (approx 200 over 200 years) entering the Baltic went there to trade in goods needed in the burgeoning shipbuilding industry.
The experience reminded my of my trip across Europe in 1999 when I decided to walk to war in Kosovo from my studio in Hampshire in the guise of a landscape painter (alter-ego) and make art along the way as part of my project INTERVENTIONS. Crossing many borders at a time when there was no freedom of movement between European nationals I had many similar interesting encounters with border officials, especially as I was making performances questioning the practice of painting and mark-making on the borderlands in a series of video works named PLEIN AIR I-V. At that time I had abandoned photography as documentary and inspired by Duchamp's readymades experimented with performance using lens-based media to record spontaneous events and happenings as I made my way through Europe by foot. It was a pretty crazy adventure and I arrived in Kosovo 68 days after leaving Petersfield, which was exactly the same length the conflict between Milošović's Serbian army and NATO' lasted. Various configurations of some of the work produced have been exhibited over the years, first at the Danish Museum of Photographic Art (Brandts) in 2000 and most recently a selection of works were exhibited at Øksnehallen in Copenhagen as part of major survey show looking at 100 years of street photography between 1917-2017.
If interested, see more here:
https://www.martintoft.com/interventions
https://www.martintoft.com/pleinair-iv
Image converted to B&W to give it a bit of the old Soviet style gritty look...
