Summer is a time when representatives of different professions strive to transfer their work to the open air and expand its geography. Once upon a time, young architects built their objects in Sukhanovo, and now on Lake Baikal. This year, the number of such concept-travel festivals has multiplied, there are at least three of them: "Cities" on Lake Baikal, Shargorod, and ArchStoyanie, which is held with the participation of architects for the third time - the first two were last summer and last winter. In general, the place of the ArchStation, the village of Nikolo-Lenivets in the Kaluga region, has been mastered since the late 1990s by Nikolai Polissky and Vasily Shchetinin.
Border and infinity - this is how the curators Julia Bychkova and Anton Kochurkin outlined the theme of the second summer ArchStation, wishing, on the one hand, to study the degree of the festival's influence on the life of nearby villages, and on the other hand, to determine its boundaries, which should be investigated, understood and indicated by architects and designers.
Unlike last year, now projects were made not by venerable Russian architects, but by well-known Western ones - the Dutch land art guru Adrian Geise and German architects Berhart Eilens and Irina Zaslavskaya, who recruited students from related design and design universities from different European countries to their teams.
The main and most interesting imported exhibit, which was added to the exposition of Nikola-Lenivets objects after the ArchStation 2007, was Adrian Geise's "Shishkin House". It is an impressive landscape feature, although it ended up in the farthest corner. Geise worked brilliantly on the theme of the border - he fenced off a regular square from the edge of a thick young forest, surrounding it with walls taller than human height, but without a roof. There is also no entrance at ground level, which is usual in such cases - to get inside, you must first climb the outer staircase, and then go down the inner staircase - you can look at the interior of the box either from above, evaluating everything as a whole, or from the inside.
This is how the maximum fencing was achieved, allowing the greatest success to manage the emotional properties of the "interior", made of natural materials in nature, but does not possess wildness from the inside. On the contrary, all this seems to be a good example of the European attitude to nature in general - it is protected, preserved, and limited in every possible way, and the result is an extremely cultured and humanized, “civilized” product, even if it is environmentally friendly.
The main trick is that the walls are made of cones. Rather, they are made of planks, with a small indent from which a grid is placed, cones, mostly pine, are filled between the grid and the boards from the inside and outside. The floor inside is also covered with cones. It took 5 cubic meters of this very fruit, but the students did not collect cones around the district, as one might think, they were brought in special containers. The technique of fixing something that is not small, but free-flowing with a mesh is well known and is called a gabion, but more often pebbles are used in this capacity and structures can stand for a very long time. The winery "Dominus" of Herzog and de Meuron, and the pavilion of Ireland at the exhibition in Hanover 2000 by the architect Bernard Gilne, described, in particular, in the III issue of the magazine Project Classic, were made in a similar way.
Therefore, the most important thing in the Geise object is that not stones, but cones are used. As the West 8 architect representing the object said, due to the growth of seeds that are in the cones, the walls will slowly collapse, thereby blurring the boundaries between man and nature. The thought of self-destruction is good, but I just want to argue that these cones will never germinate, they do not always sprout while lying on the ground; but, indeed, they can gradually rot, and this will also be a gradual destruction.
However, if we leave aside the future of the object, we must admit that it is good both on the outside - a laconic rough-brown rectangle, and on the inside, because the enclosed space, covered with an unusual, to put it mildly, material for construction, perfectly concentrates emotions. On all sides there are cones in an amount unusual for a forest, but the planes are all flat. Several pines have been preserved inside - in fact, this is a pavilion for admiring young pines, which are full in the forest around, but they are lost in a motley environment of birches and willows, here all other trees are destroyed, you can even notice one stump.
In addition to pine trees, the Geise pavilion houses various small and perishable objects made by young architects as part of the workshop Vacation of the place, which West 8 held from 1 to 4 August. The seminar was attended by students from Hungary, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, who had lived all this time in a tent city. Herbaceous installations, which are considered the furniture of "Shishkina's House", are cute and small - a table with the same cones, a plait of blooming peas of a bundle of short logs and a nettle stalk on a hummock - the latter, by the way, allows you to assess the degree of thoroughness of the entire pavilion as interventions in nature - in order to place the cone cover on the ground, the sod was pulled down by 5-10 centimeters. By the way, they made a mound-bench from it, also a piece of "furniture".
Demonstrating "Shishkin House" to journalists, an architect from West 8 did not fail to touch on the main theme of the festival, saying that the idea of a border is very important for such a protected natural place as Nikola-Lenivets, which is now rapidly settling in by architects and where a lot of people come - accordingly, the question arises about the extent of the occupation of the territory. For clarity, he gave an example of the transformation of several casinos into the fifteen millionth city of Las Vegas - in his opinion, this should not be in Nikola-Lenivets and art should restrain the influx of people. Anything can serve as a border - a work of an architect, a sign with the inscription "Private territory", unmown grass, or simply the absence of the usual benefits of civilization - for example, mobile communications. And also, apparently looking at the Russian reality, the architect advised to introduce some rules that are mandatory for this place - do not use plastic, remove garbage, use art objects to lay a route through the park, preserve the silence of nature and use only a bicycle to move around the territory.
All these ideas are very good and understandable, but they come into conflict with both reality and the original intention of the ArchStation - which was invented in a way to attract people to this very remote place. Of course, looking at how landscape art spreads in concentric circles, turning the surrounding area into a park of conceptual objects, one can think about the limits of the intervention. But on the other hand, one might think that the Dutch architect did not go to this distance by car and did not see the terrible kilometers of abandoned fields in the Kaluga region.
Another youth workshop was conducted by German architects Gerhard Eilens and Irina Zaslavskaya, who, with their multi-component project Infinity in Russia, paved the way through different nooks and crannies of the territory - in particular, from the main meadow to Nikolai Polissky's project “border of the empire”. Italian students made a cafe in the forest from improvised means - wooden tables and sun loungers over which music from hanging bell bottles plays. Russian students in the middle of the field have built a philosophical bed of logs - heavy thoughts, birch branches - lighter and hay - dreams that you can indulge in lying on it. Others carved a silhouette of a lying person who was collecting garbage right in the ground. In one of the corners of the forest, thin, almost invisible threads are stretched between the birches, indicating the fragile inviolability of nature, which is so easy to violate. During the excursion, the heads of the "workshop" invited all those present to tie the logs into the Big Eight - the sign of infinity.
Another major project of ArchStation 2007 was created by Nikolay Polissky, the “original” inhabitant of this place. The objects of Polissky are very large and very smart - if you wish, you can find many meanings in them, and their sizes amaze the imagination of viewers accustomed to gallery intimacy. The implementation of objects invented by the artist since about 2000 has become one of the main local crafts, soon the enterprise received the appropriate name "Nikolo-Lenivetsky crafts", again ambiguous, since nesting dolls are not made here. But they are doing something more.
This summer, in full accordance with the theme, Polissky built rows of large gnarled border pillars in the fields on an elevation, topped with dumpy (made of snags) two-headed eagles, now with knobby structures resembling a stylized mace; although there is a version that these are eagle eggs. All together it is called "the border of the empire" - according to the author, an occasion to think about the topic. Either this is a customs post on the border of the Nikolo-Lenivets possessions, or the memory of the army of Khan Akhmat, who left the Ugra incessantly, or a pagan temple. But after thick paraffin candles and hemp torches were lit around the pillars “in the steppe”, the impression became especially magical.
For a long time nowhere has there been such a deeply felt and direct image of the coat of arms and the state border. Yes, perhaps, and statehood. The interesting thing is the border of the empire. A self-respecting empire must constantly expand its borders, while it has not yet fallen into decline. An empire in constant borders is nonsense, imperial borders are constantly expanding and narrowing until it ceases to be so. And another paradox - a border is a border, but there is not a single border. Geyse has, but not here at all. There are pillars, but they are completely permeable, if you want - go around, and then, it does not limit anything, although having connected the imagination, one might think that Nikolo-Lenivets fenced off from Moscow. On the right is Ugra, on the left is the border, we are a buffer.
In sum, one learns a good answer to the theme of the festival, here there is a border, and infinity, and a longing for berendey not alien to romantic natures. At least put on a ballet.
The border pillars can be climbed along conveniently located wooden ledges, which gives everything around some kind of Shrovetide shade, reinforced by the swing next to it. The swing is also large, you need to sit on a log that can withstand many people. The swing was practically not empty, and if we evaluate the festival as an attraction, then this is the main one.
Not far from the "border" - another project of Polissky, "Tower of Babel". It is also very large and is based on the principle of a basket that is woven from the bottom up, gradually, in rows of vines and birch twigs. The last row is still green, below are thick wicker walls, scaffolding around. The height is already seven meters, and the tower is already well visible at the entrance. The author, however, does not want to stop there and invites everyone to participate in its construction, that is, weaving. The design is pretty solid and promises to be quite Babylonian.
In general, with the advent of Europeans, the theme of standing seems to be not the border, but the East-West. To the far corner, the West creates something austere and sophisticated in a contemplative orientalist key (and this is how it is!), And ours, on the way, are waving a fragment of an endless border. The West teaches smart architecture students to make small objects out of grass and imported boards, and the Russian artist involves local residents in creating meaningless and ambiguous landscape objects that are breathtaking, like swinging on their own swing. However, both East and West converge in refinement and contemplation, this, apparently, Raseya contradicts them with characteristic ambiguity and scope. But we must not forget that all this is a product of art and real life has only some relation.
Despite the fact that the main summer presentation has already ended, the objects are available for inspection - excursions are organized to the ArchStation exposition. For booking seats on the bus and clarifying the date, please call: 8 484 34 33 782, 8 916 135 74 22. Julia
