The exposition of the Russian pavilion consists of three halls. Climbing the stairs, on which black plywood silhouettes of people are lined up, we find ourselves in a room with rough brick walls and a black-and-white movie about the city of Vyshny Volochek. The film is not so much documentary as fiction, albeit somewhat "clip": in short, it shows people who come to abandoned factories and their memories of the past. The film is good and quite lyrical (many at the opening of the exhibition spoke "in the spirit of Tarkovsky"), there are many spectators in front of the screen, despite the fact that there is only one chair.
In the next room, a circular panorama awaits us, an oil painting, as they say, painted by graduates of the Repin Institute specifically for the exhibition. This is a thorough, realistic and very optimistic painting, the traditions of which are diligently observed in our art institutes. It forms a qualitative contrast in all respects with the film shown in the first hall. There are tattered walls, black and white, fragmentary, half-blurred and from time to time losing focus, imitating amateur filming, cinema. Here there are cheerful colors, bright greenery, flowery water, traced to the brick of the building; the illusion of an ideal reality, a kind of spring paradise, an embodied dream, into which the viewer enters, and she surrounds him from all sides. Including from below, since there is a mirror on the floor that reflects the picture and depicts water. Spectators find themselves on the wooden walkways in the middle of the painted city, to some extent - they find themselves "inside the picture", in the painted illusion of a beautiful, joyful, in all parameters of a better life. This is something like the notorious hearth painted on the wall. Somewhere around here there must be a golden key to a life full of happiness.
It is not difficult to find this key - after checking two adjacent doors (one of them leads to the balcony, and you can see that the panorama is carefully inscribed in the landscape of the lagoon, the line of its horizon tends to coincide with the real one, which is typical for the genre of such "trickery"). So, the "key" is found behind one of the doors, behind which is the third hall of the pavilion. It features five architectural projects made specifically for the exhibition as part of a curatorial concept. These architectural projects are inscribed by the artists in a circular panorama of the ideal future of Vyshny Volochek, and in the next hall they are presented in an architectural way, on large tablets.
The curatorial idea was well known to everyone long before the opening of the pavilion; it was talked about not only in Moscow, but even in New York. The author of the idea is Sergei Tchoban, one of the three curators of the pavilion (co-curators are Grigory Revzin and Pavel Khoroshilov). Its essence is to revive one of the many dying "small towns" by reconstructing abandoned factory buildings. As an example, Vyshny Volochek was chosen, a city between Leningrad and Moscow, which has many dilapidated weaving factories and an equally neglected network of canals (Peter I ordered to build canals in order to turn the former portage into a navigable ferry), which makes it partly similar to Venice.
Sergei Tchoban invited four architects, two from Moscow - Vladimir Plotkin and Sergei Skuratov, two from St. Petersburg - Evgeny Gerasimov and Nikita Yavein. The fifth was the SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov bureau, which designs for both of these cities. Each got his own assignment: Nikita Yavein worked with the buildings of the Tabolka factory; Evgeny Gerasimov was involved in the regeneration of the Paris Commune factory; SPEECH contemplated the development of the Aelita factory; Vladimir Plotkin turned the former Ryabushinskys' factory into a museum of technology - the "Knowledge of the World" park; Sergey Skuratov designed a cultural center with a folklore theater and craft workshops on empty islands in the city center.
Architects not only received plots for work, tied to a specific location and objects; they visited the city, talked with its mayor - in a word, the projects were done quite seriously. The functions were chosen not abstractly, following the example of the reconstruction of factory buildings in the capitals, but with an eye to the actual needs of the city: for example, none of the participants proposed to close the existing factories. SPEECH bureau offered to sew clothes of fashionable Russian designers at the “Aelita” factory and sell them in a boutique here at the factory; and even agreed on a hypothetical cooperation with the rising star of Russian fashion Alyona Akhmadulina.
Regarding the revival of the city, the architects' plan looks like a hybrid: they do not restore all the abandoned factories and other public goods dear to the hearts of the native inhabitants of the city. On the other hand, architects do not turn Vyshny Volochek into a branch of the Red Rose or Winery, rightly judging that a small town does not need so much contemporary art. It is assumed that the city can, partly preserving its industry, become a "meeting place" for people from St. Petersburg and Moscow, who, for example, come for stylish clothes, to a museum of technology or a theater. One more theme arises here - the correspondence of the project to the Biennale theme. It fits very well: the city, in which people now meet less and less, according to the authors' plan, should turn into a meeting place for the inhabitants of the two capitals, and all this with the help of architecture.
The design of the Russian pavilion must be recognized as very well thought out, almost ideal. There is a lot of social pathos in it: architects came together to think about how to help a dying city. Considering that there are a lot of such cities (about 300), then the topic is very important, and, by the way, it has almost never been considered in a positive way: they talk about how bad everything is from time to time, but no one speaks on topic "what to do". There is a response to the main theme of the biennial “people meet”. There are high quality modern and varied architecture of the projects. And, by the way, the entire exposition of the pavilion (both the film, and the painting, and, most importantly, the architectural projects for the reconstruction of factories) was made especially for the Biennale.
The exposition of the pavilion looks very solid and well thought out, three halls, three themes; both emotionally and figuratively it is very clear. The viewer finds himself first in the strict space of reality, then in the fabulous space of a dream, after which he discovers architectural projects - what this dream is based on. All this is logical, beautiful, relevant and important. One problem is utopian. This project is an exhibition initiative, theoretically it could stir up the country, take root, become an example for other similar initiatives and progressively change reality for the better. But now this project is essentially purely artistic. Perhaps that is why the bright distances are painted in oil on canvas, and it is not known whether a magic door is hidden behind the canvas, leading to a bright tomorrow.
In the near future, we will publish detailed descriptions of all five projects shown in the Russian pavilion.
