According to Vladimir Semenikhin, who presided over the ceremony, the awards fall in unison with the exceptions of the Russian language: pewter, wood, glass. These awards are small objects made especially for this occasion by well-known Russian designers (they fit in bags approximately 20x20 cm).
The glass prize - "for the subject of industrial replication", was awarded (to whom would you think?) - Vera Mukhina, for a faceted glass, a favorite object of a Soviet person (let us make a reservation that Mukhina's authorship in terms of the glass is not fully proven). Neither relatives nor heirs of the famous sculptor were invited to the ceremony, so the museum representatives received the prize. The same one that is in the new pedestal of the "Worker and Collective Farm Woman".
Pewter - “for perseverance to be a designer in Russia”, was given to Vyacheslav Koleichuk, an architect, artist, inventor who made the first kinetic compositions in Russia in the 1960s. A whole hall was dedicated to them at the exhibition “The Phenomenon of Russian Design” in the M 'ARS. So the first two awards were for the history of Russian design, its two periods, pre-war and post-war. But about modernity …
Derevyanny, “a company for bringing design ideas into everyday life,” was awarded to IKEA. The audience of the chamber ceremony at DesignBoome-e, most of whom were young designers and architects, greeted this message with well-discernible giggles and skeptical comments. So, another presenter of the ceremony, one of the main organizers of the festival, as well as the owner of the premises, Andrei Samonaev, considered it necessary to immediately comment: “don’t think, Ikea was not a sponsor of the festival and did not financially participate in its holding. … This time only the Polytechnic Museum helped us… As for the rest, the festival was made with our own money, cut off from family budgets,”complained the head of the Design Boom. Although, - he added immediately, we plan to hold it annually, and then, perhaps, there will be sponsors, and the prizes are not symbolic, but monetary, and now, perhaps, Ikea will join … design theme of prices and competition.
The giggles of young Russian designers can be understood - when you sell a beautiful ashtray for 1,500 rubles (here in Design Boom), and in Ikea you can find similar things for, say, about a hundred rubles, that is, something to think about. It is not easy to sell a chair tied with ribbons for six thousand dollars … No matter how many times it won Red dot design awards. By the way: hurry up, young highly paid office workers, here you can buy wonderful gifts, beautiful and unique. Because the gallery launches the works of Russian designers even into production, which is very good, but in small batches. The result is more reminiscent of objects of modern art in its relatively restrained variety. You can donate a picture, or you can give a designer ashtray. However, design certainly comes from art, but Ikea does not attract Russian designers-artists to its developments. Actually, in all respects, the wonderful Sretensky festival is a collective anti-crisis measure of the district galleries, a way to attract attention to themselves and their works.
And along the way to speculate about the future of the city. Immediately after the awarding ceremony, a discussion of the "city game" of the British Council took place (City game is one of the "games" held within the framework of the Creative Cities project). The same young designers and architects poured into the lower hall, where they talked about projects that had been invented the day before. The task was to come up with a concept for the development of the Sretenka area. This process is obviously useful and exciting; it was interesting to listen to. Although the ideas, as was later noted by the jury, consist of a set of typical and fashionable proposals, in our times they are almost clichés. Namely, ecology in all forms, a ban or restriction on the entry of cars, close attention to garbage. Landscaping, including on the roofs - hanging gardens, playgrounds; mining underground rivers, ranging from small streams and ending with flooding the quarter and turning it into Venice (the experts liked this idea for its scale). In the latter case, the cars will no longer enter, of course.
The authors of the most integral, in my opinion, concept also spoke about it better than anyone else (the Latvian presenter commented on this performance as follows: “how I love this Russian soul!”). The project is called Trash Design; the point is that each of the art galleries, of which there are many on Sretenka, put a bin on the streets for special garbage - old things used by this workshop in its work. At the same time, she conducted master classes on the use of, say, old plastic glasses or outdated (in the future) iPods. … Any grandmother who is keen on knitting can collect old knitted things, sell the knitted ones and at the same time conduct knitting lessons for neighbors, the authors say. The idea itself is beautiful, at least not as worn out as the Hanging Gardens. However, the traditional flea market is more effective for the needs of the grandmother, and even for the artists. The authors of the winner by the decision of the project Sretenka Hollywood (Natalia Zaichenko, Liza Kiseleva, Marina Khrustaleva) remembered about the flea market. It is proposed (again) to clear the area of cars, remove containers with garbage underground, camouflage air conditioners on the facades, replace signs with retro ones - and use this space as a permanent set for historical films.
Among the jury members, the Trash project was liked by the youngest (whom it was even strange for me to see in the jury, and not among the participants), Nikolai Pereslegin. The rest unanimously spoke in favor of the "mythology" present in the "Hollywood" project, and this is quite symptomatic. It seems to me, although I may be wrong, that somewhere abroad the preponderance would be the other way around - something environmentally clean would win, and not saturated with additional, all the more historical, meaning. It is not excluded that in this decision of the jury the "Russian soul", carried away by myths and fairy tales, can be guessed. Although, strictly speaking, all five projects are very utopian; Let's just say that the organizers (it is not known by what efforts) managed to install on the streets announcements of a design week and a dozen objects, as well as integrate into the usual weekend market with their "hay" art market. But the procession of designers through the streets was no longer approved for them. You can imagine what amount of approvals the implementation of at least a small part of any youth project will require.
During the discussion of projects, the jury members also raised an important question - what is Sretenka, what is the main thing on it? Roofs? Courtyards? Streets (English heritage representative's version)? I have an alternative version. Listening to the arguments about knitting grandmothers and looking at the neighbors under this story - fashionable designer shoes, large stones on my fingers, I thought that now Sretenka is not a house and not streets, this is a get-together. There are simpler party-goers who have enough clubs, and there are more difficult ones who are drawn to the European-style stripped brick walls of galleries. Well, they hang out and enjoy each other's company. Not that it was bad; although it cannot be said that very well. It's just that Sretenka, like other areas of the Moscow center, has changed a lot over the past 15 years, and now, it is now in search of a new identity.
