The core of the exhibition is the work of two well-known Moscow photographers, Vlad Efimov and Yuri Palmin, made as part of a special project. This artistic part was joined by two other projects, journalistic research from ‘GEO’ and stands dedicated to the work of NIP Ethnos restorers in Nizhny Novgorod, who, among other things, specialize in the restoration and cataloging of wooden architecture. These projects have become a successful informational addition to the art photo exhibition.
As a result, the exhibition turned out to be more voluminous than one would expect from a photo project. She attracted the attention of specialists. And she demonstrated to everyone else that the appearance of this exhibition is not accidental now. If in the last third of the 20th century, wooden houses in Nizhny Novgorod were quietly destroyed from old age and neglect, and in the 1990s they even tried to preserve them, then recently (after all, after the arrival of Governor Shantsev), a sad turn has been outlined in the fate of these representatives of green buildings.: a significant number of wooden houses are to be destroyed. In their place, on the outskirts of the southeastern, historical part of the city, residential construction is planned. Maybe the crisis will prevent this and the houses will continue to quietly collapse. Or maybe not.
But everything that was said at the opening somehow leaves no hope for the wooden city - either the houses will be demolished, deleting what is needed from the register of monuments; either burned; or they will collapse from old age; buildings with the status of a monument have hope of salvation, but even after restoration they sometimes look somewhat … plastic, or something. It seems that no one has any illusions about preserving the wooden quarters - all that remains is to photograph. This is how we return to the main part of the exhibition - photographs that captured houses and, at the same time, the process of their destruction. About the features of these photographs, and this destruction - an essay by Marina Ignatushko:
If you take two wonderful photographers, put them in Nizhny Novgorod for a few days, explain to which addresses to go, it does not mean at all that they will obediently follow the instructions, painstakingly study the proportions, look for sandriks and compare the types of carving. They do not need a register, measurements and explanatory notes. It is simply naive to expect artistic enthusiasm from them, as well as the exact designation "general's house" or "coachman's house". Their works will not adorn the "Notes of local historians", because they do not contain methodical research on whether the alteration affected the dimensions of the facades, or the changes affected only the architectural plastics. And the number of shots does not affect the picture of the whole. The idea of the whole escapes, dissolves in a multitude of fragments-impressions …
Remembering how the results of expeditions look in reference books, scientific publications and guidebooks, at the first moment you feel a slight smack of defeat. Well, not this was to be expected from a serious undertaking!
Where is the protest against the demolition of old houses and an attempt to see architectural monuments in them ?!
There is no protest.
There are not even questions in response to which inquisitive minds would gather conferences, study experience and take measures to preserve the historical heritage.
There is no documentary fixation of the historical environment in these shootings of Efimov and Palmin. But the environment itself, too, is long gone.
Layers collide like natural elements. The forms have lost their stability. The original idea was disheveled by time. The houses themselves adjust to a different scale of perception, provoke feelings.
Walking through the old city, the artists are carried away by aesthetic experiences. Halftones, rhythms of shadows, transparency and density, rows and heaps, round and straight, massive and graceful - all this breathes warmly and calmly …
Yes, exactly - warmly and calmly, prompting not to action, but to meditation.
We also wander around the city, having long forgotten historical plots, dates, tales, not distinguishing pylons from pilasters. Completely at the mercy of visual, spatial experiences, sometimes colored by personal memories.
Memories have nothing to do with the history and life of old houses. Therefore, shooting a wooden city by an outside observer is a pure experiment, not loaded with private experience and sentimental relationships. This view of the old Lower local mythological context is not readable, so the image goes to a different level of generalization. The Wooden City is the ruins of a Russian identity that has lost its will, "an almost natural process of forgetting the past." Ruined space frees one from the illusions of everyday life, reconciles with the power of time.
Philosophers associate the hypnotic charm of decay with the perception of ruins ultimately as a product of nature. Human expediency is inferior to unconscious forces.
Perhaps that is why the arson of old wooden houses in the name of new buildings causes indignation: impatience and greed invade the natural harmony of wilting. The rumble of bulldozers and cars approaching the ruins is frightening, because it signals the end of contemplation.
The appeal to the phenomenon of ruins is symptomatic.
A ruin is different from rubbish: it is valuable in itself - as a multi-layered aesthetic object, where "the past and the present are fused into a single form." Perception does not depend on whether our imagination connects the fragments into a pre-existing whole. A ruin is "the remnants in time of a whole, which expresses itself in an exhaustive way in the random time of its own part." It not only gives some idea of the harmony of the past, but provokes new experiences.
This form of experience needs only space and time: explanations, a list of dates and names become tiresome rattling, not shaped into a melody.
Defining ruins as a "form of confluence" also helps to understand the negativity of the practice of so-called re-creation of monuments. They disassembled the wooden house by logs, threw away the rot, left three original crowns, renewed the "carpentry", assembled the object in a new safe place - and it does not warm! The proportions, the volumes seem to be the same, only the experience of everyday life is already merged with the attraction. An attempt not just to stop time, but to ignore it.
Meditations by Efimov and Palmin in wooden Nizhny Novgorod have a result in full accordance with the genre. The photographs reflect the vision of a person with a different picture of the world than that of the builders of wooden houses: the experience of filming by the authors of modern architecture and Soviet constructivism affected.
Transcendental sensuality recoded meanings, expressing the spiritual not in reference to the historical, but with the help of color and abstract forms. The randomness, the fragility of the handicraft geometry of wooden houses give these abstractions a human sound. "My sorrow is light" - how could it be otherwise …
