The End of the Line

Azerbaijan sits at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, along the ancient silk route. To the north is war-torn Dagestan and a new refugee crisis, to the west Armenia and Georgia, and to the south Iran. On the east is the Caspian Sea, home to 90 per cent of the world’s caviar and an estimated 100 billion barrels of oil, which leaks out through antiquated Soviet oil wells and turns blue Caspian water into black coffee. International oil companies, including Exxon and BP Amoco, have claimed the rights to Azerbaijan’s oil in deals that mean Azerbaijan will not benefit substantially from the liquid gold it sits on for a decade.

Preview

Hide legend

The landscape has been raped in rough attempts to tap its vast resources. In Azerbaijan today, there is a striking procession of enormous, abandoned factories like over-sized steel graveyards on eroded wastelands dotted with ancient oil wells, yet there is hardly a bird in the sky.

Amidst it all are the people of the wagons, victims of an undeclared war which began in 1988 over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated territory housed entirely inside Azerbaijan's borders. The war left 30,000 dead and more than 830,000 Azeris homeless and internally displaced in a country unable to support them.

Six years later, Russia oversaw a fragile cease-fire which has mostly held since but Armenian troops have held one-fifth of Azerbaijan's land, and almost one million Azeris who populated those lands are now housed in ramshackle accommodation across Azerbaijan. Few, however, are quite so ramshackle as the rusting wagons of Imishli, where 10,000 people have spent seven blistering summers and freezing winters.

The railway wagons were once part of an intricate USSR railway system, which boasted efficiency but assured interdependency and control. A rich grape-growing region, the railways would carry Imishli's grapes to the Ukraine where it was bottled and railed back to be sold on Imishli's streets as a product of Ukraine. Such was the USSR's way: as long as factories were dependent on each other, the country remained controllable. It is claimed one factory in western USSR made only left shoes, while another in Siberia made the identical right shoe, ensuring each factory could not privatize or expand without the other. But when the USSR collapsed, so did the livelihoods of its millions of people.

From an article by Rod Curtis.
Many Thanks to World Vision

This exhibition has been produced with the support of Marie Claire.