On July 6, the Russian-French festival of contemporary culture "Bobur" opens on the territory of the Nikola-Lenivets art park in the Kaluga region. The head-liner of the festival is Nikolai Polissky. Together with his team of autodidact artists, united by the brand "Nikola-Lenivets Crafts", he will present the monumental structure "Bobur", woven of natural materials on a metal frame.
The name refers to the image of the oldest quarter of Paris (Beaubourg), in which the main one is the Pompidou Piano and Rogers Center with its turned outward communications, pipes on the façade and cheerful parties at the foot of the square. Around the village "Bobur", musicians (including the famous noise orchestra of Petr Aidu), artists on stilts and without, will also dance around the village "Bobur". Children will make their own Beaubourg. The shaman artist German Vinogradov will ignite the mood … Polissky's counterpart is the Frenchman Xavier Jouyot. He will offer sky-art performance with aerodynamic sculptures that will plow the sky. Xavier was inspired by the aerial sound of the name of the village, next to which "Bobur" was built - Zvizzhi: flight of a bumblebee + sound of an agricultural vehicle.
The Beaubourg Tower from afar clearly resembles the shape of the Indian Lotus Temple with huge petals. When approaching, twelve trumpets - elephant trunks, protruding from the "lotus", blow powerfully in all directions. The comparison with Indian images does not disappear, but is supplemented by variations on a kind of media attack, with loud signals thrown into the landscape of the Central Russian Upland. Natural texture, hand-made plastic (the monument is woven from a birch vine) are traditionally combined for Polissky with the technocratic, constructivist order of form creation. To the light, the braid looks like the frame of modernist houses, and inside the Beaubourg tower there is a screwed-in metal staircase, very reminiscent of the engineering achievements of early modernism, Shukhov or Eiffel. Such a paradoxical, in many respects ironic and chic with its maestria opus is a trademark of the style of "Nikola-Lenivets Crafts". French, Russian and even Indian make up the territory of the notorious Eurasia in the most non-aggressive, not dogmatic, but creative mode of understanding it.
I ask the artist Nikolai Polissky:
Why Beaubourg?
- I just like this building. It is so fundamental for the architecture of the 20th century: favorite pipes, sockets. The Parisian Beaubourg had problems adapting to the historical context. We probably do too.
– This is possibly a plus. After all, a strong architecture can afford a complex dialogue with the context. Weak or rejected by them immediately, or dissolves without a trace.
- By the way, Beaubourg does not irritate me in historic Paris. Much more - the Eiffel Tower. It is that she is foreign, and he is his own. When you walk up the escalator on the façade of Beaubourg, you see a large part of Paris. Likewise: when you climb the spiral staircase inside our Bobur, you contemplate all the surroundings of Nikola-Lenivets. I hope that we will rent the Beaubourg tower to artists as a museum, and on the square in front of the tower, by analogy with France, there will be performances and concerts.
Is there any common cross-cutting theme that unites your objects, starting with "Mayak" near the Ugra river, ending with Bobur near the village of Zvizzhi?
- On the territory of the Ugra National Park, indeed, an axis of large objects is being built. All of them are architectural brands from different times."Lighthouse", "Universal Mind" (including the Hadron Collider), "Ziggurat" and "Cooling Tower", "Borders of the Empire" (columns of the imperial forum), "Beaubourg" … All these are monuments of human civilization imprinted in architecture.
- It is curious that in this list there are absolutely no truly Russian wonders of the world …
- That's the point. Here, on the Ugra, we are privatizing the whole world. We do so that all world wonders become completely ours. If we start doing something like the Kremlin here, we will get a tautology, oil.
Is it supposed to unite all objects by a common program of use and interaction with the visitor? Is there a route planned?
- First, of course, there must be a path. It needs to be cut through. I want to rearrange the columns of the "Borders of the Empire" on the way from Nikola-Lenivets to Zvizzh, along the old road. There will be such an Appian road between Beaubourg and the Universal mind. I would like to come up with a festival that assumes that some kind of mystery will be played out at each of the objects.
How is the management of your projects organized?
- The company "ArchPolis, ANO" is engaged in organizing the art process, festivals, as well as everything accompanying them: the construction of hostels, campings, large workshops. They promise me a workshop with an area of 750 meters. An entire household yard of the collective farm was given over to workshops. This company, Archpolis, negotiates with the state. She won a tender for the development of tourism infrastructure.
- That is, in the case of Nikola-Lenivets, the emphasis inevitably shifts from the Laboratory to the territory of Entertainment, a pleasant pastime for the broad masses of workers and students in their leisure days.
- Yes. It's unavoidable. But I hope that art is also included in the sphere of interests of the ArchPolis company, that the managers of our projects do not want to make money only on the sphere of leisure and entertainment services. Making money (on tickets, tents) is not the only goal, I would like to believe. Moreover, I am sure that random people will gradually exclude Nikola-Lenivets from the list of their pilgrimages. We will wait until something like Disneyland and an aqua park is built near Kaluga.
The paradox: your objects are clearly designed for a huge number of accomplices, spectators who live in them, climb over them, communicate with them in a large team. At the same time, when there are a lot of people, you do not like …
- Twenty people a day would be enough for me at each of my facilities. Even when there are no people, buildings live. You don't have to see a huge crowd every day. An aching feeling is born when a monument merges with natural silence.
How are relations with the ArchStoyanie festival, which will open on July 26, developing?
- I am invited to participate in the selection of works. However, I do not feel myself inside the festival format. The problem of ArchStation: the participation of a small number of architects with interesting ideas and their vivid embodiment. Brodsky, Bernasconi, the landscape architecture of the Versailles park - it's all wonderful. However, there is no clear rhythm in the organization of the process. I would be pleased if the French implemented a large program within the festival to recreate different images of landscape gardening art. I would like the very formal component of the ArchStoyanie festival to be clearer and more meaningful.
What building will continue the "Axis of Civilization" you have outlined?
- In the village of Zvizzhi, to which we have almost reached, there is a skeleton of a central store. This is such a ruin of Soviet modernism, picturesque remains with abstract paintings on the walls - traces of batteries, fragments of interior decoration … I want to turn this store into a kind of urban sculpture. I have been thinking about working with concrete boxes for a long time. I also want to do a long-standing project. Behind the "Universal Mind" there is a large territory, which consists of a young birch forest with clearings. There I would like to put about a dozen pavilions - works of authorship by various artists, like the iconic houses of Valery Koshlyakov. In fact, the ArchStoyanie festival began from these pavilions of artists and architects.
