Watch Carhartt WIP's Team Shred Ulaanbaatar in 'Out Of Steppe'
Ten years after ‘Mongolian Tyres’ and ‘Dirt Ollies.’
It was back in 2004 that Carhartt WIP‘s skate team decided to venture to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to skate a giant skatepark that they had seen in a photo, only to find the structure had been torn down three weeks prior to their arrival. The ensuing video–Mongolian Tyres–and photo-book–Dirt Ollies–depict a trip around a country undergoing a serious change under the twin influences of industrialization and globalized capitalism.
Ten years after the fact, Carhartt’s squad returned to Mongolia—now one of the quickest growing economies in the world, thanks to a trove of underground natural resources—to catalogue the drastic cultural shift and transformation taking place in the capital through the lens of skateboarding. The documentary, Out Of Steppe, features team riders Joseph Biais, Jerome Campbell, Igor Fardin, Yoshihiro “Deshi” Omoto, Sylvain Tognelli and Phil Zwijsen speaking on the lasting impression that Ulaanabaatar’s culture had on them, all while shredding some of the country’s breath-taking brutalist Soviet architecture.
The documentary was originally released a year ago, but it’s now available to stream online for free.