“Everything is clear with Mandelstam, but I don’t understand what Pasternak is doing,” Sergei said at the moment when I looked into the hall. The second day of the "Stone on Stone" slow reading festival, organized by the educational project "Eshkolot" in a holiday home near Moscow, was ending. After three main lectures, the participants, one of whom was Sergei, were invited to participate in the evening (the clock showed five minutes past nine) seminar "Projection on a sheet". Its presenter, philologist Azarya Roset, has collected eleven excerpts of works of art describing architecture: streets, temples, cities, stones. It was proposed to discuss what the authors were trying to achieve. Speaking about the opposition of the mosques of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva to the mosques of Istanbul by Brodskys, the metaphor of the “tent complex” was discussed as depressing and down-to-earth. Dealt with the attitude of Bely to the political line of Peter and Catherine on the example of his comparison of St. Petersburg streets, created with one and the other.
The tenth anniversary festival of the Slow Reading series was dedicated to architecture, hence the name about stones. At the previous "Eshkolot" has already managed to make out the non-verbal texts of films, paintings and dreams, in the summer of 2015 they read the city as a woman. This happened with the departure to Jerusalem. Or, for example, they arranged a comparative reading of classical Jewish and non-Jewish texts. Explaining the very approach of slow reading, organizers, as a rule, draw an analogy with the movement of slow food, slow food, which opposes the industrial approach to food production, fostering an attentive attitude to nutrition, both from the standpoint of benefits and from the standpoint of taste. In addition, the Eshkolot events, as a rule, are guided by the traditions of the Jews, and this nation, like no other, has worked on the topic of reading, thoughtful perception, interpretation and reinterpretation, so that the overall picture was not trivial.
As part of the reading of stones, it was proposed to choose one of three streams: "Ancient World", "New Jerusalem" or "Memory and Utopia". Each included lectures by two researchers, ten academic hours each. Just four days. As an addition to the program, two plenary lectures were also included: an opening topic and a closing one. The first, by Vladimir Kagansky, is about reading the cultural landscape, the last - by Sergei Sitar, who juggled the definitions of the language of architecture and architecture of the language by literalizing the reading metaphor of the festival.
Since I regularly turn out to be an interpreter at the architectural workshop, when writing articles about new buildings, on excursions, during crazy Facebook discussions “why do many people disapprove of the Triumph Palace,” the idea seemed to me extremely curious. It seemed that the teachers, and the list, I must say, was wonderful: the historian of architecture Vadim Bass, archaeologist Mikhail Freikman, art critics Sergey Kravtsov and Lily Arad, architects Mikhail Bogomolny and Maxim Atayants, - that each of them will demonstrate his own method of reading architectural objects, and then will offer to work in the same way together. Approximately in the same way as during the above seminar from Azarya Roset the quotations from Mandelstam, Bely, Wilde, Eco and others were interpreted.
Just imagine that the townspeople will learn to interpret the language of architecture (Eco just wrote about its existence, however, with the properties of a secondary nature in his semiology). Personally, I am fascinated by the prospect of achieving harmony in the relationship between this type of art and the nonspecialists sentenced to live with it. It is clear that the inability to grasp the author's statements is one of the key reasons for irritation, especially when you are present in his work from day to day and are fighting for survival: pushing in the subway, standing in a traffic jam,going against the flow of the wind of the departure highway, overcoming large-scale areas, bumping into the stone harsh facades and getting nervous in search of the main entrance to a concrete block identical on all sides. In any case, it seems to me that, however, it can be attributed to a private desire to control the environment. Pasternak succeeded, somehow in his own way, but beautiful:
The slab was hot, and the streets of the forehead
He was dark, and looked at the sky from under his brows
Cobblestone, and the wind, like a boatman, rowed
By faces. And all these were similarities.
- the same excerpt from Parsnip's "Marburg", which caused some difficulties in relation to him outside the context of the story told in the verse of the acceptance of the refusal of the beloved.
As the festival has shown, acquaintance with the context turns out to be the main problem. It is impossible to understand the ritual practices of the Neolithic era without knowing the peculiarities of the shaman's immersion in a trance, which means that the word “temple”, which the researchers of that era use in their reasoning, will misunderstand, you will consider those “temples” similar to modern religious buildings - in a word, you will not understand of the whole arrangement of then life. And there, after all, the deities did not exist for a long time, only consciousness and nature flying away. “Bass teaches us to talk with stones,” wrote one of the participants, tagged #eshkofest. “Transparency is not about seeing everything. It's much more interesting to see a little bit. Transparency is when there is a hint and there is a way so that you yourself can discover something. This is such an erotica of the city,”another quoted Mikhail Bogomolny, who spoke about the urban development relations between Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea. The abundance of the context of perception and knowledge of architecture made it possible to excite the imagination, but at the same time prevented the lecturers from giving it to the audience to be torn apart, which is why the seminar form almost did not happen. Three interviewed experts, almost repeating each other's words, said that to provide a base of understanding, it was important to give out information as much as possible, because among the participants, in addition to obvious architects and art critics, there were philologists, historians, psychologists, engineers, cultural managers, teachers, chemists (the diversity of specializations is a separate happiness of the festival). That is, they all had a very different idea of the demonstrated architecture, its origins and language. Discussions moved to the sidelines, when after two pairs, questions and reflections were definitely accumulating. The most beautiful picture of those four days is Maxim Atayants, trying to have lunch before leaving, surrounded by the students of the course "Ancient East", hastily expressing all their considerations, clarifying the details. Moreover, some were worried about the question of finding out the weight of giant stone blocks that fell into the masonry of individual temples, while others were concerned about the combination of the found artifacts with written sources, including sacred texts.
I wish I could talk and think about architecture every week in some good place. You see, she would have improved. And you can also read the texts of theorists, for the sake of greater immersion.
