The book “Belyaevo forever. Keeping the Unremarkable”is released in electronic form and in print on demand format. With the kind consent of Strelka Press, we also publish an excerpt of it for you to read here.
The author of the book is Kuba Snopek, an architect from Poland. He entered the Moscow Institute of Media, Architecture and Design Strelka in 2010 and ended up there in Rem Koolhaas's study studio, where he studied the problem of preserving the “inconvenient” modernist heritage. This problem really exists: there is a huge amount of architecture that cannot be preserved, because it is not unique, and nowadays only the uniqueness of an object makes it possible to preserve it. Koolhaas cited the Berlin Wall as an example - a simple object, but loaded with important intangible connotations, but not unique, as a result of which he died. Kuba Snopek tried to apply this methodology to the Russian context, namely, to the Moscow district of Belyaevo.
But the most important thing there is not at home, the author writes, but the cultural context of the era, which, in particular, he draws from films of the Soviet era. Snopek draws various parallels with a specific neighborhood, he is interested in Soviet life and everyday life. He finds famous people who were associated with Belyaev. Among the "stars" who at different times, it turns out, lived here - Groys, Parshchikov, Yankilevsky, Popov and many others, however, according to the author, the most famous of all was the poet and artist Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. And, of course, it is important for the author that it was in Belyaevo that an important event for Russian art took place - the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition.
This cultural baggage of the region, according to Snopek, gives every reason to advocate for the need to preserve Belyaev. His diploma at Strelka ended with a project of a certificate of the outstanding world value of this area, which is necessary for its inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List as an object of a new type of historical heritage, and the book with a story about how this provocative idea provoked protests from local residents. who wrote a complaint against him to the prefecture: they were afraid that the protection status would interfere with the development of the area. That is, the preservation of the "physical" Belyaev is extremely difficult.
However, the question of the method of preserving Belyaev is still an important problem. The houses there had a shelf life and were originally designed for only 20 years of operation, after which they had to be replaced with more comfortable housing. Indeed, how can these houses be preserved now - with leaking roofs, cracks, permeable joints between panels and everything else? And their architecture is not at all unique. Therefore, taking into account the initial lack of uniqueness in the typical development of Belyaevo, Snopek says that we are not talking about the integral preservation of the area, but only about the preservation of a unique component - the intangible heritage. The author calls for the creation of new criteria for the preservation of areas similar to Belyaev. His idea is supported by an ingenious illustration proposing the transformation of the UNESCO logo - replacing the ancient temple with a panel house.
Snopek tries to create a "real mythological tract" out of Belyaev and thereby start the process of mythologization. He paints an idealized place: "Unlike the northern and eastern regions, the South-West of Moscow, like a magnet, attracted the intelligentsia with its academic and cultured nature." Belyaevo appears before the readers inhabited by conceptualists headed by Dmitry Prigov. And in the book, indeed, most of all attention is paid to Dmitry Alexandrovich, who was called “the most important inhabitant of Belyaev,” and the fact of his life there therefore gives the main impetus to the idea of preserving the area. But how important is Belyaevo for Prigov's creativity? Snopek cites several of his poems as proof, but they could have been written in any other residential neighborhood.
Snopek is quite categorical in a number of his conclusions. For example, the common features that connect the microdistrict and the Moscow conceptual school are "repetition, and emptiness, and rejection of the visual." And his assertions that the “total” approach to construction is reflected in the total approach to art (meaning total installations) undoubtedly has a sound grain, but sounds more than polemical. The problem is in understanding "emptiness" and "totality" as supposedly self-evident concepts, despite the fact that their roots in conceptualism and in Soviet reality are not traced, it is also unclear how these roots could "intertwine".
The arguments that in Belyaevo "the architectural environment stimulated artistic activity" also does not seem obvious. Of course, the sleeping area is important for Moscow romantic conceptualism, but the communal apartment in the center is no less important for it, as well as the appearance of an additional day off, which allowed the conceptualists to organize actions outside the city. All these factors are equally significant for a researcher who has some experience of life in that era.
The resulting book is a typical Strelka product: the information in it is presented in an accessible way, with a view to the general reader. But, unfortunately, for all the importance of the institute's publishing program, its publications also have shortcomings, which Belyaevo forever demonstrates in full: the style of easy popular research and the tendency to build bright, paradoxical concepts that often ignore real historical facts, and the very need to study them.
However, the problem of preserving Belyaev and other similar micro-districts exists, and it is unclear how to talk about it, all the more so - to solve it. The merit of Cuba Snopek is that he was one of the first to talk about this and ensured that this topic began to be widely discussed. About "Belyaevo forever" is often spoken about (although so far the book is more on the hearing than on the table), and now, based on the research of Snopek, a series of excursions and educational events was even organized in Belyaevo. Its program includes a courtyard developmental workshop “How to become a famous artist” and an interactive game “Belyaevo-quest. Bulldozer".
