- What is the meaning of your installation? What is most interesting about it, in your opinion?
“Our installation was named“The Museum of Rural Labor”, and the most interesting thing in it, I think, will be the relationship between the external image and the internal space. This is a tower with a diameter of 3.2 meters and a height of 8 meters, which from the outside works like a geometric sculpture - a kind of order column that appeared out of nowhere in a potato field near the village of Zvizzhi and at the same time looks as if it always stood there. When you look at it, the most different associations can arise - from a banal water tower to the last column of the disappeared acropolis, and most importantly, it will be quite difficult from the outside to assess its true scale, because a structure lined with adobe will visually merge with its earthen base and general environment.
Those who travel to small towns and villages are accustomed to such small verticals, water towers, which have long lost their functionality, but serve as identification marks of settlements. Our tower from the side will look like just such a half-abandoned dominant, although in fact it is conceived to be inhabited. We just made the entrance to it quite inconspicuous, placing it on the side opposite the road. The inner space is directed upwards and is illuminated with warm light, and on the walls of the tower we place objects of rural life. The tower is called the “Museum of Rural Labor” because it contains genuine artifacts that will only temporarily turn into objects of display.
Who are your co-authors in this project?
- We invented and realized the Museum of Rural Labor together with the talented architect Agnia Sterligova. Our cooperation began in 2012, when Agnia, as part of the SPEECH bureau, was engaged in a project for the exposition of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Together with Agnia, now an independent practicing architect, we also made installations in Milan - U-Cloud in 2014 and Living Line in 2015 (together with Sergey Kuznetsov), and in January of this year we developed the design of Jan Vanrita's exhibition “Losing face”for the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.
You did projects in Milan, but you haven't participated in Archstoyania before. Why now?
- It is a great honor for me to participate in the Archstoyanie festival. This year the festival is being held for the tenth time and, let's be frank, I did not immediately receive an invitation to become one of its authors. The first time Nikolai Polissky offered me this was about three years ago. And then we considered a very interesting site at the entrance to Nikola-Lenivets, but it so happened that the festival was forced to adjust the geography of the installations, another site appeared for us, and for her Agnia Sterligova and I also made two proposals, but for different reasons and they have not been implemented. And then Zvizzhi appeared, this potato field, the idea of an entry sign, and finally, as they say, everything came together. And I am very happy about that.
How did the Archstoyanie context influence you? How is this installation of yours different from your other works in the same genre?
- The key theme of Archstoyanie is precisely the space, the landscape in which the festival is held, and all installations here are large architectural and sculptural objects that are created in the natural environment and then settle down, constantly interacting with this environment. The genre of exhibition, temporary architecture is, in principle, very interesting to me, and the opportunity to create an object focused not on the urbanized, but only on the natural environment should be recognized as unique in general, so we plunged into the context with great pleasure and tried to find an interesting hand-made embodiment for it. Of course, this also influenced the choice of material. We understood that only absolutely natural material is appropriate here, but at the same time not wood, since the theme of wooden architecture, in our opinion, at Archstoyanie has already been more than disclosed. So we were looking for an equally natural, "living" material that just naturally appeared and at some point is able to disappear just as naturally. And in the end, we settled on adobe cladding, ideally emphasizing the fact that our structure grows out of the ground, symbolizing labor on the ground, which has always been and remains the main support, the column on which human well-being rests.
Although the material, proportions and function are different, compositionally and figuratively: as something standing in an open field - there is a similarity with Brodsky's Rotunda standing in the fields nearby, in Nikola-Lenivets. How conscious is this similarity? Is it a tribute to a place, a postmodern dialogue or an accident? Or is the landscape provoking?
- To be honest, I don't see any similarity between our object and Alexander Brodsky's Rotunda. Is that the round shape of both objects can lead to such an assumption?.. Such a shape is really always very interesting and advantageously perceived in natural spaces - a fact known at least since the Renaissance. And in terms of proportions, materials, perception, our "Museum" and "Rotunda" are completely different. Some parallels, rather, could be drawn with Nikolai Polissky's "Beaubourg" - an elongated shape, crowned with a kind of completion. But, I repeat, if our object refers to some prototypes, then these are real-life water towers of numerous villages and villages.
