Vladislav Savinkin and Vladimir Kuzmin are curators of the Zodchestvo festival in 2018 and 2019. Last year, the festival was held under their leadership in the Manezh with the theme "Recontext", in the coming October it is planned to open in Gostiny Dvor with the theme "Transparency". The collection of applications for the next competition of curators of the 2020 festival ended last Friday; on the first day of the festival, October 17, they promise to announce the results.
For your attention - a conversation with the curators of the second year about their plans and concept.
You have already worked on Zodchestvo in 2005, 2006, 2012 and last year. Why did you decide to try yourself as curators again?
Vladislav Savinkin: In the early years, we were not curators. Then - both in 2006 and in 2012 - we only dealt with the exposition of the festival. And in 2017, we have already decided to participate in the competition for the position of curators and won. As a rule, the Union of Architects chooses curators for two years, so we worked on Zodchestvo last year and returned to it now. And it was interesting for us to speak twice, to look at the festival from polar points of view. The exhibition of 2018 was held under the auspices of "PE-" - everything so changeable, reformatted. This year, we generally looked at everything from the point of view of openness and transparency - it seems to me that the very space of Gostiny Dvor contributes to this. Of course, it would be ideal to put there a certain number of large-scale models made of plexiglass, transparent plastic and similar materials, dilute it with open constructive solutions, fragments of real facades - and that's it, nothing more, you don't need to do anything. But these are dreams, this is what we come out with as a concept. "Architecture" is characterized by the fact that it has very strong traditions. You could even say it's pretty conservative. But for us this is a kind of super task, we still imagine ourselves as designers, exhibitors who dare and can change something. We find ourselves in this.
Where do you see the festival's "conservatism"? What cannot be changed in it?
V. S.: The passage of the first persons through the exhibition: it should be convenient, clear, it should go from the lighthouse to the lighthouse - preferably, by a well-built road. We regard the exposition as a labyrinth with varying degrees of openness. Under the existing conditions, this is difficult to implement, but there is nothing wrong with that. The second point is the regions that are not always willing to give in to our requirements and wishes. You can declare the theme "Transparency", give freedom to the regions, but they will still bring their park, their new architecture, they will look at participation in the exhibition more from the reporting and political side, to a lesser extent - from the artistic side. But in this way we have more freedom and emphasis on the path, which we free up (in the sense of transparency) and give to those who play by our rules - colleagues, designers, educational institutions, who respond more directly, openly, kindly and try to respond to this curatorial question: what is transparency in modern design culture and architecture, design, art. Our profession is generally a compromise, therefore, between these two poles, we try to establish an exposition, not forgetting about design objects that will be open and also spatially almost transparent, will carry some kind of functional meaning. For example, when doing navigation, they always put a pillar and a pointer, and we want to keep the pointers, but remove the pillars. Of course, this is not easy to do, but we designed it and are currently implementing it.
Did you have any experience in organizing such events before you were the first exhibitors of Zodchestvo?
Vladimir Kuzmin: Yes, by that time we had already managed to act as curators at several events, including the ARCH Moscow exhibition, comparable in scale to Zodchestvo, and in 2008 we worked closely with the curators of the Venice Biennale. We quite often supervised events of various sizes, but until 2005-2006 we never dealt with Zodchestvo.
How has Zodchest'19 changed in comparison with 2006?
VC.: The main difference is that we are now much older than we were when we did the first exhibition. Our outlook on life, our capabilities and aspirations have changed quite a lot during this time. The main thing has not changed: we continue to be architects-designers, love this profession, work with space. But we still got older, which means that there are people younger and more interesting than us, who know things that we don't even know about and that we will never know. Every year there are more and more of them. It is fundamentally important that the festival is now turning its face to these people. If earlier it was focused on demonstrating the achievements of the regions and the competition of everything, now we have the opportunity to some extent to designate, track and try to implement everything in terms of relevance, because time is changing extremely quickly. The more sensitively "Zodchestvo" will react to these changes, the more accurately it will be able to reflect the present day and the aspirations of people who are just entering our profession and begin to work in a completely changed world.
V. S.: Today everyone started thinking about the exposition. There are no companies, no architectural bureaus, no co-curators who bring five tablets, hang them up and leave. Everyone designs an exposition - someone with us, someone separately, someone in communities and collectives, but they care about what and how to present. This is not our merit, but we made our contribution to the fact that there are not enough tablets at the festival. We fought against this both in 2006 and in 2012, and wanted, if not to liquidate it, then at least somehow change it. Now it is interesting to walk around the exhibition with colleagues, and with parents, and with students - that is, it has become a truly outstanding architectural and design event, a short-term public space, but one that everyone comes to. It seems to me that this year Zodchestvo becomes even more open. You didn't just come, didn't understand anything, and left. Now you find yourself in a labyrinth in which it is interesting for you to visit. This is the greatest merit of all the curators who have been for many years, and we also had a hand in this.
VC.: Zodchestvo 2006 fully corresponded to the concept of the festival of that time. There was a competition where everyone was submitted and everyone was accepted, there was an exhibition of regions and several related exhibitions of some materials and technologies. There was not even a curatorial project as such. We are almost the first to create a separate block of curatorial projects. I don’t presume to judge, perhaps, there were such attempts before us, but I remember exactly that in the form and volume in which it is now, this was not. Everything just started in 2006: we came up with an idea of how to reorganize the “architecture market”, which was then an exhibition. We managed to move the tablets back a little, and in front we made a special area that formed the visual image of the exposition. Later, after six years, we had the opportunity to clearly formulate the environmental concept, consistently carry it out, rigidly highlighting the curatorial zone. It was presented in a media format - in the form of a huge wall on which a giant video installation was projected. What happened in 2018 and what we hope will come out in 2019 is the development of the curatorial block, emphasizing it. We are grateful to the Union of Architects for agreeing to this, trying in every possible way to find opportunities to implement our idea. In addition, we are supported by partner companies that also participate in the creation of the space and see the sense in this.
You said that Zodchestvo is becoming more open to young people who are just entering the profession. How is this openness expressed?
VC.: The fact that they, in principle, appear at the festival, become not just nominal participants in some abstracted abstract competition of tablets with images, but they are already included in the context of the work of individual parts of the exposition - both within the framework of curatorial projects and within the framework of special projects. This year we will host several architectural schools, and the Assembly of Young Architects will make a separate exposition. Various special projects, in fact, are initiatives of fairly young professionals.
How did you come up with the Transparency theme? What does she mean?
V. S.: We are now opening the city to man, opening access even to some secret buildings. My students from the Institute of Business and Design entered the laboratory design competition; Has anyone ever designed laboratories openly? And now they are talking about it. It would seem that the laboratory is something secret, and it does not need an interior design, as long as nothing explodes. And now people understand that there should be a comfortable environment for both employees and guests - not only members of the government. For example, there you can arrange exhibitions for schoolchildren, show them how artificial oil is born or something else. This is openness. I don’t want to say that openness means glass facades, nude structures, open partitions, mobility, it goes without saying. The dematerialization of walls has long been present. They become thinner, partitions disappear, the world becomes open along with architecture. This phenomenon also has a downside: you are so open and wonderful running and suddenly hit your forehead against a glass wall, and no one fenced you off, no one saved you either from a brick that falls from above, or from meeting a fool.
VC.: We hope that within the framework of special and curatorial projects that we will present at the festival, we will all try to answer the question of what transparency is. After all, this is the task of curators - to create conditions in which different answers arise.
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zooming 1/4 Project of the Zodchestvo festival exposition in Gostiny Dvor, model 07.02.2019 © Savinkin & Kuzmin
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zooming 2/4 Project of the Zodchestvo festival exposition in Gostiny Dvor: plan 1 © Savinkin & Kuzmin
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zooming 3/4 Project of the Zodchestvo festival exposition in Gostiny Dvor: plan 2 © Savinkin & Kuzmin
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zooming 4/4 Project of the Zodchestvo festival exposition in Gostiny Dvor: side perspective © Savinkin & Kuzmin
You have already mentioned some of the technologies and materials that make it possible to achieve transparency. Besides glass and thinning walls, what else is used for this?
V. S.: Water, air. Various art and architectural exhibitions, made from a design point of view, have shown us for a long time that you can walk through an air wall. For example, we arrive in Milan and on our way to the train station we find ourselves under a jet of cooling steam. Crossing this border, we become new people. We can say that this is something point, momentary, artistic gesture, but here's another example: how do we pass turnstiles in Singapore? We just go and they read us.
What other materials could you cite as an example?
VC.: Grids, various polymers, structures of varying degrees of filling, systems of elements and structures, which in one way or another are characterized as transparent. There are techniques to ensure that standard common materials are used in situations where they become transparent.
What are these tricks?
VC.: Let's take concrete. We know that it is completely opaque by itself, but imagine that there is translucent concrete. It has a corresponding structure that allows it to achieve a certain degree of transparency, but at the same time it remains concrete. Any material that exists in reality - any stone, wood - under certain conditions can in one way or another be associated with the idea of transparency. This is what our curatorial exposition is about.
Last year, architecton was the spatial concept, but what is planned for this year? What will the space look like?
V. S.: The axis will be preserved, which, on the one hand, will become more complex, on the other, more transparent. Transparent plastic will be used in its various forms - like a wall, like a column. Transparent layouts will show the architecture from a new angle. The exhibition will be about the fact that in any public space, in any of our architectural projects, we can see openness. No one will now enclose an individual residential building with a four-meter fence, the world has changed. Your home should be open to your family, relatives, guests. If we talk about a public, office building - we see lobbies, halls, sculptures, which, as it were, lure, demonstrate some kind of modernity of these companies. The fact that the exterior and interior are integrated into each other, I think, is already known to all Russian architecture. Wherever we are, we now see the same principle of constructing buildings: you seem to be in the arcade all the time, walking around the arcades. You seem to be on the street, but at the same time in the house. You can walk distances the size of the Boulevard Ring in an arcade without getting wet from the rain. Naturally, you can go outside - this is also openness. We offer our colleagues and partners in any of their ways to find this share, degree, mass of openness or transparency at different levels and demonstrate it at the exhibition.
What special projects will you present at Zodchestvo this year?
VC.: There will be a special project related to the theme of the transparency of the city - this is such an artistic visionary idea of how the city looks and is perceived through a photo and video sequence that captures the moments of this transparency of the urban environment. In addition, we will present a work that demonstrates the ideological transparency of almost thirty years of experience in Russian architecture of modern times - this is a continuation of the exhibition that was done at the Shchusev Museum. Visitors will also be able to visit the exhibition of the Project Russia magazine, which will show several separate, selected young, promising, rapidly developing architectural bureaus with a kind of manifest demonstration of the idea of transparency. Manufacturing companies will talk about the experience of using transparent structures in the world. Both the Council of Young Architects and children will show their works. The Association of Wooden Housing will present a project that will, as it were, declare transparency within the framework of wooden architecture. Representatives of high-tech project structures will also share their experience in this area.
Do you already know which regions will be exhibited this year?
VC.: Traditionally, the exhibition is flanked by Moscow and the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, followed by about fifteen regions. We will organize a large open central zone, which can be bypassed by an eight, and the regions and workshops will look into this zone, this is such a hidden openness.
What changes do you expect from Zodchestvo in the future?
VC.: It is necessary to make sure that all the materials provided are relevant to the topic and time. Our festival is not a place where there is a tough will of curators, it assumes a very tolerant attitude towards everything and shows something like the following: now we look like this. It is wrong, if we all the time will replicate ourselves as we are now, what will be the development? We need to focus on tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. In addition, the festival has a fairly large background of very interesting characters who were curators. The creation of a committee of ex-curators can become a very resource format for helping future curators. This was already partly carried out in the form of an advisory council meeting at the past Zodchestvo. I hope that this year too we will arrange such a meeting of ex-curators and partners interested in discussing possible ways of developing the festival. We very much welcome such things.
The Zodchestvo'19 manifesto says that “today there is no other way out but to reveal our own creative credos, innermost thoughts, secret projects,“powerful doors”,“filled storerooms”. What is your creative credo now? What secret projects do you strive to implement within the framework of the festival?
V. S.: I don’t know if I’ll mature or not show my notebooks. What I have? Over the years of work, some notebooks, moleskines, albums will be typed in height of two meters and eighty centimeters. Actually, this is my life. I could lay them out, and let them look at my drawings, handwritings, notes, sketches, intentions, projects, experiences, sometimes poetry. I realize that few people are interested in digging inside another person. The highest degree of openness is to demonstrate what you are left alone with. This is an exhibition, an artistic gesture, a dream. I don’t think, of course, that I will expose them, but internally I was ripe for this. Vladimir and I finished a study group at the Moscow Architectural Institute this year, where we have a certain number of diplomas with some degree of transparency, openness: transparent layouts, transparent facades. Most likely, we will demonstrate them. We think about ourselves a little now, we think, as if everyone with whom we communicate, acted as we need. And my projects … I don’t know if we will have a nook called “Openness of Curators”. We haven't thought about it yet. In fact, all our openness will be expressed in the exposition. Our techniques and moves will be visible there.
VC.: Working with the festival is that multifaceted view of the present day, which we think is relevant. It does not pretend to be a kind of all-encompassing character, but it is absolutely stereoscopic, it seems to have no boundaries, and, perhaps, this boundlessness and transparency of the design process, the understanding that it does not end with the completion of the construction of some object or the creation of a festival exposition - this is our credo. We made it the theme of the festival and addressed the entire architectural community.
XX VII International Festival "Zodchest'19" will be held from 17 to 19 October in Gostiny Dvor. You can get acquainted with the detailed information about the event and register for the festival as a guest on the official website www.zodchestvo.com.
