This year the international festival of landscape objects Archstoyanie is held for the ninth time. The list of partners and patrons of the festival is impressive in the press materials, from the non-profit organization Archpolis, the administration of the Kaluga region, the Ugra national park to the embassies of different countries, architectural and design bureaus. Interesting: the more impressive the organizational platform of the festival becomes, its infrastructure, the more ephemeral and ghostly the ideological and conceptual content.
The name of the new Archstoyanie, invented by the curator Anton Kochurkin, is “Here and Now”. The main theme is the study of the temporal parameters of art and architecture. It was formulated by the curator of the international Archstoyanie program, renowned director and producer Richard Castelli. He draws attention to the importance of the presence of the temporal component in the perception of architecture, to the dependence of the understanding of the image on specific historical conditions.
Strictly speaking, Time is one of the main opponents of the phenomenon of Architecture. Architecture creates an image of Eternity, not subject to the destructive movement of Time. Time erodes this image, turning magnificent palaces into ruins. Gavriil Derzhavin, an ingenious acrostic, The River of Times, wrote about this. The melancholy of ruins at the festival of young objects made by young architects somehow does not fit. Therefore, they tried to materialize Time as a kind of spatial-plastic metaphor that does not come into conflict with architecture, but endows it with a new dimension.
Right at the entrance to the Versailles park, in front of Alexander Brodsky's rotunda, the visitor sees a model of an electronic clock by the German Mark Formanek assembled from wooden slats. From six Friday evening to two Sunday night, one could observe how the workers adjusted the ladders to the numbers, removed and rearranged the planks, fixing the exact time for every minute. The patriarch and inspirer of the original idea of Archstoyanie Nikolai Polissky pay tribute to similar logically kunshtuk. He also loves devices, by definition high-tech and stuffed with the most complex electronics (such as the Andron collider), to embody in a handicraft way from felled branches, logs and twigs. But still, there are differences with the German. Polissky creates in a handicraft way the perfect forms that participate in eternity. Formanek does the opposite: he presents eternity as a total ephemerality, in which logic turns out to be practically the same as tautology, and even absurdity. Fragile thin slats do not organize such a visual image that could be associated with a platonic reflection of the eternal light of Truth and Beauty.
Monuments of ephemerality have become a kind of antithesis to what occupies Nikolai Polissky and his artel in Nikola-Lenivets. Every year the density of plastic themes at Archstoyanie is thinning, giving way to flexible intellectual training. In the "Remote Office" house, left from past festivals, in awe-inspiring silence, the Empress of the current kingdom of ephemerality, the Japanese artist Sashiko Abe, sits among the clouds of paper shavings. At the 2010 Liverpool Biennale, Sashiko Abe was among the top exhibitors. In the hands of the artist there are only scissors and paper, which she cuts, turning into whimsically curly shavings. White shavings braid the entire space of the wooden house. This meditative act, of course, delights with its ghostly quiet beauty, and those woven thought-forms that move like clouds in the space-time continuum. They make you experience fragile figures of time subtly and tenderly.
The desire to catch the elusive clouds of time determined the entertaining gastronomic project "Cloud Kitchen" by Jean-Luc Brisson. The heir to the French gastronomy jewelers, Monsieur Brisson, mixed the Nikola-Lenivets culinary recipes with French culinary fantasies. It was necessary to try "clouds" with gloves, dipping bread in something pink and white.
The theme of disappearance is also connected with the image of disappearing time. Alexander Alef Vaisman suggested visiting the architectural and optical object "Font", in which corridors of endless mirror reflections are built, and the visitor does not see his own figure. In the labyrinth "Garden of Knowledge" by Anton Kochurkin, artifacts of the time are collected: evidence of archeology and folk culture of the land of Nikola-Lenivets.
Of course, time is captured by sounds. In one of the hits of past festivals, the Arch of Boris Bernasconi, Sergey Komarov and Vladislav Dobrovolsky (Cyland group) arranged a cabinet of sounding boxes. A library of sounds is stored in the twelve cell-cells of the inner chamber of the Arch. Pull out the drawer - you will hear an opus created according to the principles of sonorics or aleatorics.
In general, sound art, which reconciles Architecture with contemporary art, and with intertextual types of creativity, and with Time, has long become a welcome guest of Archstoyanie. We remember the masterpiece of this trend, erected by the composer and musician Dmitry Vlasik and his comrades, a sound cathedral with bells on the main square of Versailles, with Brodsky's rotunda in the center. Petr Aidu and other wonderful experimenters with sound also played music at Archstoyanie. Now the Cyland group, Varya Pavlova (Lisokot), Sergey Kasich have arrived. Kasich and Varya settled down with sound on a new, just made large arch-object - the lazy ziggurat belvedere. It was carried out by the Pole-Design design group headed by Vladimir Kuzmin and Nikolai Kaloshin. The tower is nothing more than a multi-tiered stepped log house, surrounded by staircases along the outer perimeter. It is created according to the modular principle of "cubes" stands. And, ideally, it is exactly the place in which architecture receives various spatio-temporal arts. The sound-artistic multistage architecture of Sergei Kasich, built in the composition "Atonal Architectonics - Ziggurat", as well as the experimental vocals of Vary Pavlova (Lisokot), contribute a lot to the decoration of the perception of the new arch-object.
On the whole, the new festival confirmed a certain binary logic of the events in Nikola-Lenivets. The objects of Nikolai Polissky and his artels, which do not require resonance in various interdisciplinary spheres, self-sufficient in their aesthetic value, are engaged in a dialogue with the principles of new project thinking of young people, for whom it is important to master new dimensions of creative communication and develop the principles of specific, genre polyphonism. The border of this dialogue exactly follows the highway tape.
