At Utica College in Upstate New York and Norway’s Arctic University in Tromsø, Luba studied languages, philology and art history, saving every penny, sending all that she could back to her parents. She lost herself in exhibitions at Syracuse’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and, during a further year abroad in Denmark, gazed in wonder at Anish Kapoor and Kirstine Vaaben’s sculptures at Copenhagen’s museums. On her return home she was required to work as an assistant teacher in a Russian school.
‘I was super-excited to be posted to Solovki,’ she told me, now over mugs of tea in a guest house cafe. Her small, refined features – crinkly aquamarine eyes, petite upturned nose, high cheekbones – were offset by a laugh so large that it seemed to echo through the steamy windows and around so-called Prosperity Bay. ‘As a schoolteacher I knew I could become a local, visiting the labyrinths, living in the monastery, studying its artefacts.’
She went on: ‘In those early days every passageway was open, every door was unlocked. I explored the refectory, the bell tower, the Uspensky and Preobrazhensky cathedrals. One midnight I walked by moonlight through the half-ruined, half-restored Church of Nicholas, my footsteps crunching on the snow in the nave.’ She paused, an infectious warmth spreading around her, and added, ‘That first winter was magical.’
But in 2000, the year of her arrival, Solovki was caught in a power struggle, like all of Russia. As the monastery was re-consecrated, Luba – along with two artist partners – decided to create an art centre in the abandoned aircraft hangar.
‘Our objective was to place Solovki into the contemporary cultural context, and to search for new solutions to Russia’s economic and social problems,’ she told me, never suspecting that the decision would put her at odds with the Russian Orthodox Church.
Together she and her partners cleared the building of rotted fishing nets, stapled plastic sheeting to the walls and built a larchwood bar, bookshop and moveable Tracey Emin-type bed. With ‘wild youthfulness’ they created a venue for dialogue, inviting Russian and international artists as well as organising dance and bookbinding classes for islanders.
‘We were the gallery’s curators, its guides, bar staff and nightwatchmen. Every time it rained the roof leaked and we had to move the bed and our borrowed computer. How we managed to organise that first summer season, on a budget of a few hundred dollars, I still cannot understand.’
As well as tens of thousands of pilgrims, Solovki draws to its shores artists and intellectuals escaping city life. Along its unpaved lanes the incomers live amongst the archipelago’s 800 or so permanent residents: fishermen, monastery gardeners, guesthouse staff, and the sons and daughters of former camp guards.
‘On the island there was no meeting place so at the end of every day visitors and locals came to the gallery. We’d grab anyone interesting – a visiting biologist, historians, an astrophysicist – and persuade them to give a talk. I’d bicycle to the pier, post office and village water pump, sticking up posters announcing the event. Sometimes only ten people would show. Sometimes there’d be as many as one hundred. But every night we’d be in the hangar until three or four in the morning, talking, debating and drinking port wine. We became friends with the local community, and enemies of the monastery.’
The first summer show featured architectural caprices from Moscow, Novosibirsk and Ljubljana. In the second summer, local children – guided by professional artists – reimagined the island’s vast junk yard into a fanciful ‘Zoo Park’; an abandoned guardhouse became The Penguin, scrap metal pipes and white paint made the Dachshund-Zebra, the rusted cab of a camp lorry mutated into The Kind Giant. In its third season Luba and her partners curated Metamorphoses, transforming the function and meaning of a dozen abandoned structures.
‘It was a time when everything felt possible,’ recalled Luba.
Every day ArtHangar’s wide doors were thrown open to the world. Every night its inviting light gleamed through the chevron-patterned boards and across the water. Yet with each new summer less and less became possible.
In the village a chilling exhibition had been mounted on the tragic gulag years: cat-o’-nine-tails whips, prison-cell doors, orders of execution, photographs of twisted corpses strewn across a field and skulls stacked amongst the alder trees. It was the first exhibition of its kind in the country, and it troubled the powerful Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, primate of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was determined to control Solovki and its history. He ordered that the exhibition be closed and that all traces of the labour camp be expunged. Then he turned on the gallery, denouncing contemporary art as ‘imported pseudo-culture’. He damned the Zoo Park as a Disneyland, speculating that, if left unchecked, its sacrilege would soon overwhelm the monastery itself.
Luba argued that ArtHangar was on the outskirts of the village. She reminded her critics that the building had never served any religious purpose. It had been built in 1925 to house the gulag’s Grigorovich M-24 flying boat. In fact, the hangar was one of the few places on the island where, to use the local expression, ‘no blood had been shed’.
‘Solovki is in all senses a frontier,’ she reasoned, explaining that in common with Christianity, contemporary art was concerned with man’s quest. ‘It is a border place, a marginal place, a place of intricate and subtle entwinement of land and water, of past and present, of positive and negative experience. Artists need such places for their search, and Solovki needs art to encourage reflection.’
Luba showed the Patriarch’s secretariat the gallery’s guest book, filled as it was with enthusiastic comments. She related the story of a bereaved mother who’d made a pilgrimage to the islands after the death of her two children in a car accident. On seeing the wacky Zoo Park creatures the woman had laughed out loud for the first time in five years.
But Luba’s arguments fell on deaf ears. The Church wanted no multiple meanings, no laughter. It wanted control. Russian pilgrims who came to Solovki on a quest were to be given answers, not to find them individually through art. Local villagers – who feared eviction from their homes and expulsion from the Church – fell silent and the building was padlocked shut.
Over that last summer, dancers performed around it in the open air but soon afterwards Luba left the island, unwilling to return for many years.
‘I couldn’t face it,’ she admitted. ‘The joy had leached away during the fight with the monastery. In Russia, State and Church have been good friends since Byzantine times.’
Later that day Sami and I looked through the gaps between the planks. The promise of the Patriarch – another former KGB man, according to Forbes Media’s research in the Soviet Archives – to transform the hangar into an information centre had come to nothing. No work had been done since Luba had been banished from it. In fact it appeared that no one had even been inside it for more than a decade. Beams and roof timbers lay on the ground, faded artworks dangled off the walls and the original ArtHangar sign – fashioned in appropriate constructivist style – was hidden out of sight. The historic building was simply rotting away.
‘Art gives us insight into something we do not see at first glance,’ Luba told me. She had moved on to curate projects and festivals across the north including Norway’s Barents Spektakel. ‘Artists have a capacity for insight, perhaps even an ability to look into the future. My role is as a kind of facilitator, introducing artists to special places that are going through change.’ She paused and looked around herself. ‘It all began here in Solovki.’