We continue to talk about the plans of the Zodchestvo festival, which this year is curated by Andrei and Nikita Asadov, who spoke in detail about the idea in the manifesto and interviews.
Archi.ru:
Will you show the history of Archstoyanie or some parts? What is the “core” of the project?
Anton Kochurkin:
- We present Archstoyanie in 2014, the main part of the exposition is occupied by materials from a special project of the festival - the Lazy Ziggurat of Vladimir Kuzmin and Nikolai Kaloshin. The problematic of this festival year lies in the relationship between architecture and the factor of temporality: with the penetration of digital technologies into our culture, architecture has ceased to be self-sufficient, architectural techniques have already been described and interpreted many times. Can an architect's field of action expand? If so, where?
This year we tried to present two such models. The first of them is the interaction of material and media. According to Richard Castelli, co-curator of the festival: “architecture changes its purpose, but also because the perception of architectural objects changes, as the society that exists around it changes. The nature of Archstoyanie, which is both an architectural event and a short-term festival, is a good basis for observing the temporary component of architecture."
The second model is the search for form through the local: the local context and materials inherent in the place. This applies more to the "Lazy Ziggurat". Created from a non-combatant forest cut down on a plot infected with a bark beetle, the ziggurat has become a kind of eco-manifesto to save Kaluga forests that are dying from the invasion of the bark beetle.
Curators talk about the revitalization of tradition, and one can agree with them, revival, like awakening, is usually good, if not at six in the morning … What and how does Archstoyanie revive? How would you define his motivating ability? What brings him out of the list of pleasant outdoor recreation in the area, as Malevich would say, spiritual in art?
- The awakening power of Archstoyanie in a constant attempt to create conditions for the coexistence of the local and the imported. Every year is an experiment. The clash of urbanism and identity is the main creative challenge and conflict. Following the Archstoyanie, building solutions to this conflict becomes the leitmotif of the entire territory. "Planting" works of art on the ground allows you to combine the imported and the local, urban and distinctive, independent and anarchic.
- Malevich was not satisfied with the definition of art, all his life he was looking for an answer. And each of his answers was not final. In our case, art appears on the verge of two poles. The formal task is the arrangement of the art park. Offering artists to create an art object on site is a way for them to find their own form that reflects their own values. The second pole is the absence of a familiar urbanized context, within which other connotations are found. Switching between contexts, in my opinion, gives rise to extraordinary, free plots, maintaining the status of the territory as an "artistic freeman".
What do you yourself think about the avant-garde and tradition - are they partners or antagonists?
- Often the avant-garde becomes a tradition, but the tradition cannot become avant-garde, so the antagonism turns out to be one-sided.
This is a good question, within which there is a hidden contradiction, which is very much in line with the objectives of this festival. Using a wide range of tools this year, we set out to show the temporal parameters of the architecture. As a result, several unusual pieces have appeared. In Mac Formanek's Nikola-Lenivets Time project, time has become a simple structure; the personal spiritual practice of Sashiko Abe took on a visible dynamic form in the performance "Scissors and Paper"; the space of a small shed turned into infinity in the work of Alexander Vaisman "The Font"; Myths and legends of Nikola-Lenivets turned into solid artifacts in our project "The Garden of Knowledge", and in the object "Lazy Ziggurat" of the project group "Field-Design", the game with the basics of Russian wooden architecture reflected the variability of ideas about values in wooden architecture, which has long been famous Russia.
You are showing the Garden of Knowledge project at Zodchestvo separately from the rest of Archstoyanie. Why?
- The point is that the Garden of Knowledge is a different type of project. This project has a different audience - children, and it is presented at the festival in the children's area.
Unlike festival projects, where the artist knows that his artistic practice will be presented at the festival, work on this project was built as a process of teaching children who stay in Nikola-Lenivets in the summer. This is an educational project in which the acquired knowledge was presented in the form of installations and art objects, enclosed in a single structure. The Knowledge Garden is a way to display knowledge, skills and experience through installations and objects.
Wandering inside the garden of knowledge, the visitor finds four rooms, each of which collects and presents its own information, its own special knowledge.
The first room is the room of myths and legends of Nikola-Lenivets. The second is a fragment of a natural landscape, reminiscent of the beauty and power of the surrounding nature. The third room, ecological, was created from materials collected in the process of caring for the park: branches, dead wood, sawdust. The exposition consists of prints of endangered plants of the Kaluga region. The fourth room is the room of the future. Here are the wishes of Nikola-Lenivets and thoughts about what this place should be like. The results of the educational project, perhaps for the first time, were presented as a self-sufficient landscape object.
