Promzona (Industrial Zone) is a research-based multimedia art project by Russian artist Pavel Otdelnov, created between 2015 and 2020. It explores the history and environmental consequences of the chemical industry in Dzerzhinsk, Russia, through painting, photography, video, installation and archival research. The project combines personal and family history with the broader legacy of Soviet industrialisation and post-industrial transformation.
Overview
Background and concept
Promzona examines the post-industrial landscape of the chemical plants in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, one of the main centres of the Soviet chemical industry established in the late 1930s. During different historical periods, local factories served both military and civilian purposes. During the Second World War, some enterprises produced chemical warfare agents. In the post-war decades they manufactured products including fertilizers, herbicides, DDT insecticide, acrylic glass, caprolactam, acetone and other industrial chemicals. After privatization of the 1990s, many factories were declared unprofitable and closed, leaving behind a distinctive post-industrial landscape.
The project is based on the artist's family history: Dzerzhinsk is Otdelnov's home town, and three generations of his family worked at its chemical plants, from the construction of the industrial complex in the 1930s to hazardous industrial production and managerial positions during the late Soviet period. This personal connection became the basis for an artistic investigation of how individual memory intersects with the wider social and environmental consequences of Soviet industrial development.
A particular focus of the project is the Voroshilovsky workers' settlement in Dzerzhinsk's Eastern Industrial Zone, where the artist's grandparents lived. Because the settlement lay within the pollution zone of the surrounding chemical plants, its residents were resettled to safer districts and the settlement was removed from maps in the 1960s. Establishing its precise location became one of the starting points of the project.
Research and artistic method
The project was developed through extensive archival and field research. Otdelnov examined archival records and Soviet-era local newspapers, collected oral histories, consulted local historians and environmental specialists, and conducted fieldwork in the industrial zones of Dzerzhinsk and the former Voroshilovsky settlement, working with historical maps and with aerial, drone and satellite imagery in order to locate sites that no longer appear on official maps. Combining painting, photography, video, installation, texts and found objects, Promzona explores the afterlife of Soviet industrialisation through historical, social and ecological perspectives.
Documentary film
In 2020, Welsh musician and filmmaker Geraint Rhys directed a short documentary film In the Footsteps of Ghosts about Pavel Otdelnov's Promzona. The film received an Honourable Mention at the New York Film Festival and won the Best Documentary award at the Moscow Shorts International Film Festival in January 2020.
Project structure
The project is structured into six thematic sections: Museum, Traces, Wall of Fame, Ruins, Sand and Cinema. Together, they trace the history of Dzerzhinsk's chemical industry from its origins and official narratives to industrial decline and its environmental and social consequences.
Museum
The Museum section recreates the format of a local history museum and establishes the historical framework for the exhibition. Based on Otdelnov's field research in the abandoned Voroshilovsky workers' settlement in Dzerzhinsk's Eastern Industrial Zone, it combines found objects, archival materials and multimedia installations documenting the history of the city's chemical industry. Among the exhibits is Pits (2019), two lightboxes displaying photographic collages of the remains of workers' barracks, which may also have served as air-raid shelters.
A separate part, Claus (2016), is devoted to Otdelnov's correspondence with Claus Fritzsche (1923–2017), a former Luftwaffe pilot held in Soviet captivity, whose memoirs—found by the artist in the Dzerzhinsk historical archive—describe the prisoner-of-war camps near the Voroshilovsky settlement. Having established that three such camps existed near Dzerzhinsk, two of them in the eastern industrial zone, Otdelnov contacted Fritzsche by email and sent him a 1942 aerial photograph of the settlement. Fritzsche annotated a Soviet map in reply, allowing the camps—and with them the position of the vanished settlement—to be located; the resulting correspondence, photographs and maps were shown in the Museum section. The central installation is a floor projection of a satellite image of the White Sea industrial sludge reservoir, which has stored chemical waste since 1973, together with a map identifying industrial plants and waste disposal sites, including the illegal Black Hole landfill. Other works include Graphite (2016), graphite electrodes, formerly used in chlorine production and laboratory flasks containing chemical odours in the installation Odours (2019), extending the exhibition's documentary and sensory dimension.
Traces
The Traces section comprises paintings derived from photographs published in factory newspapers between the 1950s and the 1980s, alongside found objects including fragments of Soviet civil-defence educational films. The paintings are based on archival photographs of factory meetings, propaganda and reports on industrial accidents, and employ a halftone printing effect that deliberately reduces the clarity of the original images.
The painting 12.02.60 (2016) is based on an unpublished archival photograph of the explosion caused by a gas leak at the Kaprolaktam plant on 12 February 1960, which killed an entire shift of twenty-four workers. The disaster was not publicly reported in the Soviet press.
Wall of Fame
The Wall of Fame is an installation composed of paintings, based on photographs of exemplary workers published in factory and local newspapers between the 1930s and the 1980s, including Dzerzhinets, Golos rabochego (The Worker's Voice), and Za doblestny trud (For Valiant Labour). It comprises thirty-seven monochrome portraits, including a portrait of the artist's grandmother. The installation traces changes in the visual representation of industrial workers from staged studio portraits of the 1930s to more informal workplace photography of the 1980s. Discarded industrial gas masks recovered from the factory sites are displayed alongside the paintings.
Ruins
The Ruins section presents a series of large-scale paintings depicting abandoned factories and industrial interiors linked to the artist's family history. The works contain no human figures and instead treat industrial architecture as the principal subject. Elena Konyushikhina has described this treatment as a form of portraiture, arguing that Otdelnov depicts Soviet ruins within the conventions of the classical portrait genre and that the resulting melancholic atmosphere foregrounds their beauty. The series examines the decline of Dzerzhinsk's chemical industry and the legacy of Soviet industrialisation.
The paintings in the Ruins series are displayed alongside excerpts from the memoirs of the artist's father, Aleksandr Otdelnov, who worked at Dzerzhinsk's Korund and Сaprolaсtam chemical plants from 1973 to 1986 and later became director of a cosmetics factory manufacturing products for Wella, Schwarzkopf and Procter & Gamble. Originally written for the exhibition and later published as the book No Entry Without a Gas Mask,, with the support of Triumph Gallery and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the texts provide first-hand accounts of everyday life in the Soviet chemical industry, describing workers’ exposure to toxic substances, industrial accidents, working practices and the informal culture that developed in hazardous environments. Combining technical observations with personal recollections, they portray both the risks of chemical production and the ways workers adapted to conditions where extreme hazards had become part of everyday life. Some accounts also contain elements of black humour, reflecting how workers coped with and normalised dangerous conditions.
Sand
The Sand section focuses on the contemporary condition of the city of Dzerzhinsk and its industrial zone. Several works examine the disappearance of the city's industrial infrastructure, including Tracks (2018), which depicts the abandoned Dzerzhinsk tram before its tracks were dismantled.
Other paintings address the environmental legacy of the chemical industry, including the illegal hazardous waste dump known as a "Black Hole", Hazardous Area (2018), and the simazine underground waste disposal repository established in 1976, Deep Waste Repository (2017). The section concludes with Mutant (2018), a found object representing the long-term ecological effects of industrial pollution.
Cinema
The Cinema section presents films documenting the abandoned industrial landscape of Dzerzhinsk. The films Chemical Plant (2019) and From the White Sea to the Black Hole (2019), projected on opposing walls, use aerial footage to record derelict factories, industrial ruins and toxic waste sites. The soundtrack was composed by KernHerbst.
Subjects of Memory (2016, 30 min.) is based on interviews with members of the artist's family. Divided into three chapters: Settlement, Factory and Sludge, the film examines the history of the Voroshilovsky Workers' settlement, the decline of Dzerzhinsk's chemical industry, and its environmental consequences. The artist interviewed his elderly relatives and retraced the layout of the now-demolished settlement where both of his parents were born. Their recollections include accounts of working in the nearby top-secret chemical factories and of fatal accidents that occurred there.
Chemical Plant (2019, 19 min.) documents the abandoned factories of Dzerzhinsk through aerial footage.
From the White Sea to the Black Hole (2019, 19 min.) examines the city's principal sites of industrial pollution, including sludge pits and chemical waste deposits.
Critical reception
Visual language and references
Critics have noted that Promzona draws on a wide range of visual and literary references, including Socialist Realism, classical history painting, Pop art, contemporary figurative painting, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and documentary literature. According to reviewers, the combination of these visual languages constructs an image of the abandoned industrial zone as a space suspended between a collapsed past and an unrealised future.
Kommersant magazine described Otdelnov as "the Piranesi of deindustrialisation", arguing that while three generations of his family had helped build and operate Dzerzhinsk's military-industrial complex, the artist documents the melancholic ruins of that Soviet industrial utopia.
Modernism and industrial ruins
Ivan Streltsov and Vladimir Dudchenko have interpreted Promzona as an exploration of modernism through the prism of historical and social trauma. Streltsov argues that Otdelnov reworks the modernist motif of the grid, described by Rosalind Krauss as a symbol of artistic autonomy, by exposing it to the historical realities of industrial accidents, censorship and environmental degradation. Dudchenko similarly characterises "Otdelnov's Dzerzhinsk" as a "ruin of modernism" and a "lost version of the future", relating the project to the legacy of Alexander Rodchenko.