For decades, fragments of rockets launched from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome have rained down on the forests of the country’s far north, becoming an unlikely source of income and raw materials for local communities. At Moscow’s Ruarts Foundation, ‘Fallout Zones’ brings together photography, sculpture and anthropological research to explore how the remnants of the Soviet space programme have transformed everyday life in the region. Nadezhda Lisovskaya discovers how four years of investigation by artists Igor Elukov and Polina Timofeeva, and anthropologist Makar Tereshin, have turned this extraordinary story into an exhibition.

This autumn, the Ruarts Foundation is hosting an unusual exhibition, ‘Fallout Zones’, which explores space debris as a sociocultural phenomenon that has transformed life across an entire region. Bringing together contemporary artists Igor Elukov (b. 1991) and Polina Timofeeva with anthropologist Makar Tereshin (b. 1996), the project is the culmination of more than four years of fieldwork, archival research and artistic experimentation. The exhibition presents the interim findings of their investigation, revealing how the remnants of space exploration have become embedded in everyday life and offering a new perspective on space in its ‘domesticated’ form. ‘Fallout Zones’ is part of the Foundation’s annual grants programme.

Russian social and visual anthropologist Makar Tereshin (b. 1996) first became interested in life in the remote villages of the Mezen River basin a decade ago, while researching the everyday lives and traditional occupations of Indigenous communities. However, he soon found himself drawn to a more contemporary phenomenon: the ways in which local people had learned to coexist with the waste left behind by the space industry. He was subsequently joined by photographer Igor Elukov (b. 1991), who grew up in a remote village in the Arkhangelsk region, where unusual ‘gifts of the forest’ were a familiar feature of everyday life, and Polina Timofeeva (b. 1992), an interdisciplinary artist and architect from St Petersburg.

Since the 1960s, sections of rockets launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome have been falling back to Earth after exhausting their fuel, scattering debris across the surrounding territory. Although the region is officially considered sparsely populated, it is far from uninhabited. For residents of the Arkhangelsk region and the Komi Republic, the land has traditionally provided food and a source of income through hunting, fishing and foraging. Until the early 1980s, the cosmodrome’s operations were shrouded in secrecy. Local people could see rockets passing overhead and encounter strange, twisted pieces of metal in the forests, but had little idea what these objects were or where they came from. Unsurprisingly, many were afraid to approach the wreckage. The area was also patrolled by the military, who, to maintain secrecy, destroyed intact rocket components using explosives.

With the collapse of the USSR, deprived of state support and their usual reliable sales channels, hunters saw a new source of income falling, literally, from the sky. They began to form teams, collect fragments of the stages, sell them for scrap and adapt them to their own needs, since the military no longer had any interest in space debris. Fearful of stories about radiation, the wreckage hunters also quickly learned how to distinguish dangerous fragments of rockets fuelled by toxic heptyl from those running on a mixture of kerosene and oxygen: the former were painted white, the latter grey.

Local people found inventive ways to make use of whatever was available, repurposing everything from bolts and rivets to large sheets of metal. The exhibition includes photographs of sheds and houses roofed with salvaged duralumin and titanium, as well as sledges, stoves, boats, fences and even cemetery railings fashioned from rocket debris. Nothing, it seems, went to waste. The most resourceful craftsmen reportedly even managed to construct equipment for distilling homemade spirits.

Having taken an experienced hunter as their guide, the team headed for the fallout zones where, besides studying the history of this unusual trade, they began to create contemporary art objects visible only to the region’s most longstanding inhabitants – the animals. Aligning animal trails with the trajectories of falling rockets, they made installations from so-called ‘ruptures’ – twisted pieces of casing – seeking to follow their natural plasticity as closely as possible. This was their artistic principle: not to interfere with the texture and original forms in any way, but to look for ways of combining and joining them, which took hundreds of sketches and hours of work in a forest studio and then an urban one.

There were no disputes with local residents over the finds, as anything of practical value had long since been salvaged. The artists, however, were interested in the metal fragments left behind after the military had detonated the rocket wreckage. Venturing into some of the most inaccessible areas, the team collected relatively small pieces that could be transported by boat. They then navigated a shallow waterway for some 100 kilometres to reach the nearest road. Their principal objective was to locate fragments of Voskhod launch vehicles, the last of which were launched in 1976. To distinguish these from other debris, the team even consulted an engineer from Baikonur, who taught them how to identify different rocket models by examining the electrical connectors on their casings.

The team also installed camera traps to document life around these man-made objects. The exhibition features an extensive selection of documentary photographs and a video installation revealing the unexpected coexistence of industrial debris and the natural world. Bears, deer, hares and numerous species of birds have long since grown accustomed to the piles of metal scattered across the landscape, while the forest is gradually reclaiming them, enveloping the wreckage in moss and lichen and slowly absorbing it into the surrounding ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the exhibition’s accompanying texts are rather sparse, offering little beyond a general introduction to the project. Visitors can, however, watch the documentary film ‘Fallout Zones’, which won the Grand Prix at the 35th Message to Man International Film Festival in St Petersburg in 2025. The film explores how local Indigenous communities have developed a new livelihood from salvaging rocket debris, while also documenting the demanding process of creating the exhibition itself. This involves both physical challenges – the arduous expeditions, searching for, collecting and transporting the wreckage – and artistic ones, particularly the painstaking process of arranging the fragments into compelling sculptural compositions. The artists explain that although the material is relatively lightweight, each piece must be repeatedly lifted, moved and repositioned as they experiment with different arrangements. The work is so physically demanding that these creative sessions rarely last more than three or four hours at a time.

According to the artists behind it, their project is not yet finished, and they need at least one more year to complete the particularly complex, large-scale objects and develop further various thoughts and ideas that have emerged during the work itself. A book is also on the way.