This was announced on April 28 at a press conference in RIA Novosti by the chief architect of Moscow, Sergei Kuznetsov, who was the curator of the exposition entitled “MOSKVA: urban space” (“Moscow: city space”). The commissioner of the project, which is part of the parallel program of the XIV Biennale of Architecture, is the chairman of the board of directors of RDI Dmitry Aksenov, and the art consultant is the famous architecture critic Christine Fayras.
MOSKVA will be deployed at three venues in Venice at once - in the Church of Santa Maria della Pieta, the Cavana exhibition hall and in the courtyard between them. As Sergei Kuznetsov told reporters, the dissimilarity of these spaces to each other perfectly symbolizes the changes that Moscow is going through today. "Our exposition in a very short but capacious format will show the transformation of the capital over the past 100 years - from 1914 to 2014, and will indicate the current vector of the city's development," the curator explained, recalling that the main priority of city policy today is the person and the city space. Thus, one of the central themes of the MOSKVA: urban space project will be public spaces that make the metropolis a place not only for work and life, but also for recreation, creativity, and communication. And although Kuznetsov did not disclose all the details of the future exposition, it followed from his words that one of its main characters would be the "flagship" project of the government of Sergei Sobyanin - Zaryadye Park.
This is the first time Moscow is taking part in such an initiative - to be separately presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Sergei Kuznetsov does not hide the fact that this is being done within the framework of "promoting the capital's architecture in the most global terms." In other words, at the main architectural forum of the planet, the Russian capital will be shown as a city hosting high-profile international competitions and implementing innovative projects. “However, the last thing we wanted to do in Venice was a reporting exhibition,” stressed the chief architect of Moscow. “Our exposition will be more like an art gesture, an interesting artistic expression”. Architectural critic Elena Gonzalez, in turn, noted that the idea of organizing the exhibition not in the Giardini Gardens, where most of the national pavilions are located, but in the very center of Venice, inevitably attracted increased public attention to MOSKVA: urban space.
In Venice, the MOSKVA project will be exhibited from June 7 to November 23, 2014, and at the end of the Biennale it will move to the information pavilion of the future Zaryadye Park.
