Interactive "towns" were located in the lobby of the Tretyakov Gallery at the very time when the entrance there on the eve of the "Night of Museums" was announced free of charge, so the gallery was livelier than usual. People crowding at the box office for free tickets looked in the direction of the "towns", some timidly walked around, studied the press releases, but apparently did not fully understand what was in front of him. On the floor, they spread a map of Moscow within the Third Ring Road, very close, hand-drawn. Such facelessness and unrecognizability of the capital's streets and places, according to the conception of the artists, was supposed to indicate their own attitude to the city - for them Moscow lost its identity, became nameless as a result of many years of “cleansing” for new, “alien” construction. On the map, thickening towards the center, are scattered figures of "towns" - almost all of these are construction sites. In some places the sticks are still standing, denoting the monument under threat (these are mainly addresses from the Red Book recently presented by Arkhnadzor), in some places they are lying, there is nothing to save there. A certain degree of recognizability of the objects is still present - this is the Kremlin in the center and a piece of the Kitaygorodskaya wall. The rest is rather arbitrary.
In front of the map, on the screen, there was a film shot by artists at the construction site of a house on Pokrovka - it is no longer there. There, to the sounds of perforators and other construction noises, a real game of "small towns" is going on: blow-demolition, blow-demolition, there was a monument - there is no monument … The artistic part of the action is exhausted by this. Publicistic content is expressed in the fact that there is a specific address behind each conventional figure. Photos and information on them were provided by "Arhnadzor", having posted, by the way, a list of these monuments on its website. Their images hang next to the screen, although, as the representative of the movement, Anna Ilyicheva, said, the original idea was more complex and effective - the map was supposed to become truly interactive - you walk on it, press your feet on certain points-addresses, and a monument with a description appears on screen.
Now, while the "attraction" is not working in full force, "Arhnadzor" refers all those interested in specific houses to the book by Konstantin Mikhailov and Rustam Rakhmatullin "Chronicle of the destruction of Old Moscow 1990-2006". Some addresses, including the building of the Central House of Artists, where the action is taking place, have recently become scandalous, but in total there are more than a thousand of them and, naturally, the bulk of them disappeared or disappears imperceptibly, despite the fact that sometimes these are well-known places … So, deliberately brought to an emergency state with the knowledge of the city authorities, in 2003 a house on the corner of Arbat Square and Maly Afanasyevsky Lane was demolished, the last, as Konstantin Mikhailov writes, is the historical building of the valuable front on the odd side of Arbat Square. On Bolshaya Nikitskaya, 46, during the reconstruction of the Bibikovs' estate in 2002, the semicircular two-story galleries connecting it with the outbuildings disappeared. In Sokolniki, in the early 1990s, as a result of arson, the restaurant's pavilion on Oleniye Prudy was lost - one of the few Art Nouveau-style wooden buildings preserved there from the beginning of the 20th century … And hundreds of such stories that, probably, cannot fit on any map. However, as Anna Ilyicheva noted, the very idea of an interactive map as a very witty and, most importantly, an easy-to-read way to convey material to the general public, Arhnadzor likes, perhaps after a while it will be fully implemented.
