On September 6 and 7, the Museum of Moscow will host the Moscow of the Future festival, timed to coincide with the City Day. On the eve of this event, we talked with the director of the museum, Alina Saprykina, who spoke in detail about the project and the program of the event.
Archi.ru:
What is the essence of the project?
Alina Saprykina:
- We deliberately connected the festival with the Moscow City Day in order to try to take a fresh look at our capital on these holidays, try to imagine what it might become in the future, to understand what the townspeople want to see it. At the same time, we tried to take into account both the historical and modern aspects: we studied the concepts of the city's development and “promising projects” a century ago (for example, we will show the famous collection of postcards “Moscow of the Future” created by the “Einem” partnership in 1914), and at the same time - the modern urban situation, made new forecasts for the future.
The theme of the festival is the result of teamwork. The museum employs a large creative team, and this year we all agreed on the idea of a project that would clearly outline the ideal, utopian image of Moscow - a city that is rapidly changing before our eyes.
Did the festival become a reaction to the new policy of the authorities for the improvement of the city?
- Certainly. For us, as for the Museum of Moscow, everything that happens in the city is important - whether it is the creation of a park, the rescue of an architectural monument, the construction of a new facility, a transport interchange, the reconstruction of industrial areas, the design of streets or the creation of pedestrian zones. That is why we chose City Day for our most important festival, and not, say, Museum Night. The policy of the museum today is such that all its projects and undertakings are somehow connected with Moscow. In the area of interest of the museum lies not only the history of the Russian capital, lately we have been trying to work actively in a modern format, devoting exhibitions to the most relevant urban projects. So, in the case of the competition for the concept of Zaryadye Park, our team prepared and opened a large-scale exposition that covered the entire history of this place, starting from the 12th century and ending with the last competitive works. We found this approach very important and interesting.
The festival became an occasion to remind once again that our museum, which in the future we would like to see as an advanced museum center, can already today become a good platform for thinking about the future of the city, for synthesizing the historical experience and developments of today in order to create a certain model of the city. dreams.
What, in your opinion, is the difference between today's “city of the future” from the ideas of the twenties and seventies?
- The imagination, the fantasy of a person who paints the image of the city of the future, it seems to me, is driven on the one hand by a dream - and on the other by fear. In the past, for example, people's fears were very different from what they are now. Today, people are afraid of an ecological catastrophe, overpopulation of the planet, and modified products. The ecological direction is becoming one of the main topics in modern urbanistic concepts. This is something that did not exist a hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago, the imagination of people representing the future was central to the image of movement. However, movement was then perceived as a physical phenomenon - the dynamics of streets, traffic flows … Now we understand that the concept of movement is not only in the physical plane of the city, there is also a virtual world, traffic of information flows. This aspect was not and could not be in the concepts of the “city of the future” at the beginning of the 20th century, despite the fact that even then people understood that life is in motion, and stopping is the death of the city.
How are these themes reflected in the exhibitions of the festival?
- The festival consists of three exhibition projects that interpret the proposed theme in different ways. One of them was prepared by famous contemporary artists Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky and is called "Moscow: the elusive reality". The exposition will be presented by works that tell about an ideal, but illusory city - beautiful, but never really existed, but lived only in the imagination of artists.
Another exhibition, a reportage photo project "Made in Moscow", will show the works of the best photographers dedicated to the current state of industrial territories and the processes of their transformation. We found it interesting to combine it with the utopian art exhibition of Vinogradov and Dubossarsky. Finally, the third exposition with the beautiful name "Flying Cities" is dedicated to the architectural concepts of cities of the future, created in the 20th century: it will include projects by artists and architects Vyacheslav Loktev, Georgy Krutikov, Anton Lavinsky, Ivan Leonidov. This story will be combined with the works of Alexey Kallima - this was the idea of our curator Evgenia Kikodze.
All this will be accompanied by some kind of events, as it is now fashionable to say, events?
- The most "advanced" festival format will be a lecture hall dedicated to utopian Moscow, which was invented by our new curator Alexandra Selivanova. During the day, invited lecturers, including Rustam Rakhmatullin, Sergey Nikitin and others, will perform in tandem with the artist, presenting their concept of the Moscow of the future. That is, simultaneously with the lecturer's speech, the artist will create his own new work based on what he has heard. The result of the lectures will be an exhibition of the received works.
Also within the framework of the holiday a big street game "City of Dreams" will be held, which is produced by Alexander Ostrogorsky. A play area will be organized on the territory of the museum courtyard, where visitors will be able to construct their dream city from large cubes cut from foam plastic. The moderators will be employees of the Children's Center of the Museum of Moscow. On the one hand, it's just a fun game, but on the other, it's a collaboration task, the ability to work together.
On the evening of September 6, the audience will see a real show - a spectacular audio-visual performance prepared by the creative association "Laboratory 7" and the teams "Rainbow Design" and "Power of Light", known for their ability to "animate" the facades of buildings. With the help of light, they will transform one of the buildings of the Provision Warehouses into a huge screen showing postcards from 1914 and the work of students of the children's architecture school "Start". It seemed to us important to present a child's vision, because it is the children who will see that Moscow of the future, about which we are only thinking today.
On September 7, the festival day will end with a screening of the black-and-white film "Moscow" of 1927, which we are organizing together with our Documentary Film Center. This is a very beautiful and impressive picture that we want to show in the courtyard of the museum, accompanied by music specially written for this show from the Petr Aidu Music Laboratory.
What kind of spectator is the festival program aimed at?
- We invite everyone, without exception, including the smallest visitors. The presentation of the material - accessible and understandable to everyone - is what we are working on very actively. At exhibitions, we also use several methods of presenting information. Children perceive exhibits at one level that is accessible to them, adults - at a different, more complex level, there is content designed for narrow specialists. It is clear that it is impossible to fit everything into one project, but we try to take into account the interests of different visitors. Thus, the game "City of the Future" will become a fun and entertaining entertainment for both children and their parents. The audio-visual show is designed for absolutely everyone, including the oldest audience. The lecture program will attract intellectuals - urbanists, architects, historians. In addition, this year our excursion bureau, headed by Maria Sinitsyna, prepared over 170 free special excursions throughout Moscow as part of the City Day - the entire program is posted on the website www.mosbureau.com.
Where will the main action of the festival unfold and for whom will it be open?
- Performances, fairs, games and film screenings will be held in the courtyard of the Provision Warehouses. Provision warehouses are three unique buildings, an architectural monument of federal significance, built in 1836. The Museum of Moscow, in parallel with its activities and development, is engaged in the gradual restoration of the complex. One of the buildings is now closed for renovation - at the moment there are two exhibition buildings, where during the festival it will be possible to get acquainted with the old permanent exhibition (we have mothballed it and are working on a new one), as well as to see the recently opened exhibition about the First World War and three new exhibitions, which I talked about above. On September 6 and 7, in honor of the City Day, the entrance to our museum will be free. We hope that every person interested in today's Moscow or its history will find something important and interesting within the walls of our museum.
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Exhibitions will run until September 28
