“I found Dima on one such forum for urban explorers. “I was looking for a location for shooting a music video,” Nikita explains. “We were filming in this underground river tunnel and the water started to rise. He met Nikita Stryzhevskiy, the director of Insiders Project, online. Although he didn’t have access to a computer as a very young kid, it wasn’t long before he discovered the “forums and blogs for people who are into this kind of thing”. I took a torch and went inside, like Alice in Wonderland,” he laughs. “I used to go by bicycle through the city to school,” he explains, “and one day I found this hole. This makes it easy to share videos of urban exploration with a large and eager audience of similarly frustrated adrenaline junkies.ĭima himself got into urban exploration as a schoolboy, having previously been a prize-winning acrobat. The country is only 48th in the global GDP rankings, but boasts the 8th fastest broadband speeds on the planet according to a 2011 survey, and as in the rest of the former Soviet Union, the percentage of the population who are connected is impressively high. If money isn’t readily available to many young Ukrainians then internet access usually is. Like the explorers of old, they map out the uncharted urban wildernesses they discover but they use mobile phones and GoPro cameras instead of sextants and charts. Climbing tall buildings or diving down tunnels, they discover places that ordinary city-dwellers never get to see. “Like explorers of old, they map out the uncharted urban wildernesses they discover – using mobile phones and GoPro cameras instead of sextants and charts.”ĭimitri ‘Dima’ Gromov is an urban explorer, one of a new breed of adventurers who spend their time uncovering the hidden secrets of cities. And this,” he says, turning towards his objective, “is the entrance to the nuclear bomb shelter.” “Listen, you can hear the workers bustling around above. “We’re right underneath the factory,” he whispers breathlessly to the camera. Finally, he drops down a ladder to arrive in front of a thick steel blast door.
#URBAN EXPLORER MOVEMENT PROFESSIONAL#
Despite the griminess of the surroundings, he moves with the skill and dexterity of a professional climber scaling El Capitan. Shaky GoPro footage, illuminated only by the milky light of a torch, shows him contorting his body to bend it through the increasingly tight gaps. Squeezing between reinforced concrete and rusting metal pipes, a shaven-headed young man in a tracksuit makes his way down the darkened tunnel. Words by Tristan Kennedy | Photos courtesy of The Insiders Project
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