The Marina Abramovich Institute (MAI) in the Hudson town near New York will be located in a former theater, now abandoned; it will become a space for performances, and there will also be an archive of Abramovich's work covering the past 40 years. It will also be a laboratory for the study of all temporary and intangible genres of art: cinema, theater, music, opera, ballet, video art, not to mention performances.
The diverse spaces for performances and other performances, training and research areas have been designed based on the client's rich experience, based on the achievements of OMA in the field of theater and museum design and exhibition curating.
MAI, whose full name is Marina Abramovich's Performance Art Preservation Institute, is also intended to “train” the public to perceive long-term performances and even to participate in them. Among the furniture, lamps and other objects that OMA created specifically for the institute, there are armchairs on wheels: when the audience falls asleep while watching especially long pieces, the attendants can roll them back to a quiet room.
No less original will be the 12th summer pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens in London. To work on this project, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron teamed up with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (he co-authored their Olympic Stadium in Beijing, along with several art projects).
The authors plan to arrange "archaeological excavations" on the site of the annual location of the pavilions, plunge into the ground by 1.5 m and find traces of 11 buildings of past years. One “artifact” will be selected from each pavilion, in place of which a pillar or wall will grow to support the roof of the new pavilion. To these 11 "columns" will be added the 12th, for the current year, whose location will be chosen arbitrarily.
The "excavation" space, round in plan, consisting of asymmetrical "trenches", is paved with sheets of cork; this material was chosen for its ease of use and its similarity to loose soil. In the center of the pavilion, a well will be drilled to the level of groundwater: this is another reminder to visitors about the deep, invisible layer of any building, and indeed any part of the earth's surface.
The pavilion's lightweight ceiling, supported by 12 pillars, will serve as a shallow pond for rainwater, reflecting the London sky. When you need to turn it into a dance floor or stage, the water can be drained into the well located below.
The summer pavilions of the Serpentine Gallery are usually auctioned in the fall, but this year the buyer is already known: he is the richest resident of the UK, the steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal. His interest in the project is apparently related to his general support for the 2012 Olympics: for example, he became a sponsor of the construction
Orbits, Anish Kapoor's huge steel structure next to the Olympic Stadium. The Kensington Gardens Pavilion, although not directly related to sports, is a key event in the 2012 Cultural Olympics and London Festival programs.
Another feature of the pavilion is that this year it is being built by architects who have already worked in England (the lack of such experience was the basis for the selection of program participants before). However, together with Weiwei, Herzog and de Meuron did not work in this country, which made it possible to bypass this key condition.
The pavilion will stand in Kensington Gardens from June 1 to October 14, 2012.
N. F.
