SAPAD Leave a comment
SAPAD
With his SAPAD project, Robin Hinsch hopes to incite the viewers to gain insight into their inner life.
Robin Hinsch is a photographer on the go. Among other countries, his projects have taken him to Georgia, China, Syria and Senegal. He likes to get close to the action, photographing with artistic pretensions. His SAPAD project took him to a “military Achilles’ heel” in the east of Europe.
You headed to the Suwalki Corridor to photograph your SAPAD project. Can you describe the place briefly?
The Suwalki Corridor lies in the border area between Poland and Lithuania. At the east end it is connected to Belarus, and at the west to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, so it’s defined by four countries. The border between Poland and Lithuania is only sixty kilometres long, so the region really is like a corridor. While the border between the two EU countries can easily be crossed because of the Schengen Agreement, it is not so easy to pass over the borders to Russia and Belarus.
What was the atmosphere there like? Was it a dangerous place to be?
The atmosphere was very special. I took most of the pictures during the autumn and winter months. And in fact, this neglected and diffused mood was precisely what I was looking for. A number of analysts and military experts are going crazy wondering about the best way to defend this small strip of land; however, in doing so they only ever talk about a potential danger, where the possible adversary is only very vaguely defined. In fact, there is no particular danger in the corridor, which was also why it appealed to me.
