The Nothing Special photographic project is a set of pictures taken in ex-Soviet countries from the 2000 onwards by Martin Kollar, who traveled more than 13 thousand km to shoot it. The author himself experienced the consequences of the political and social changes brought by the end of communism: he is, indeed, born in Zilina, Czechoslovakia, which is now Slovakia. This is his first work which is in fact shaped by his upbringing, where Martin was surrounded by political and cultural events that were representatives of the clashes of the period but were also, according to him, “sad and funny”. As a consequence, Nothing Special portraits this moment of change for Eastern Europe through “a tragicomedic way of looking at the world”, a lens that puts together sadness, absurdness and amusement while showing the chaos of everyday life for countries looking for a new political order.
As he says: “Everything became messy after the end of communism in Eastern Europe. If you compare it to a bottle with sediment and you shake up that bottle, suddenly you can’t see through it. Then things start to become clear as the sediment settles; that period of sedimentation was when I worked on the series”.