The Museum of Moscow will soon close the exhibition "The Time of the Moskva River", which is a re-display of the project shown at the Milan Triennial last summer and took third place there. The exhibition was supposed to end in mid-December, but it was extended, so now Sunday is the last day. And tonight a repetition of the opera "Water" by Boris Lesny and Dunya Frankshtein is planned.
The exhibition is small, admission is free, and it is located on the first floor of the third building, right behind the cloakroom, not far from the entrance to the museum from Ostozhenka. In essence, this installation is a utopian fantasy, built as a chronology of artifacts collected and commented on in the distant future. The period preceding our present is given very dottedly and begins from 1919: the countdown began a hundred years ago, so the event was chosen quite random - freeze-up, freezing of the river, which at that time happened to the river every year. The chronology as a whole is quite random and is based on the creative choice of the authors: what they wanted, they talked about. This is how the NER appears in the tape - a remarkable urban movement of the 1960s - 1970s, whose mention is motivated by their participation in the 1968 Triennial and by the fact that “their plan for the city of the future is based on the idea of a“channel”. In general, the "channel" of the NER is a developed road, not a river, but NER members participated in the triennial 61 years ago, so they entered the composition as a kind of "support group": even though the 1968 triennial was closed almost immediately due to excitement, the very fact of participation gave the Moscow movement a powerful impetus, and the authors of this exhibition seem to be joining the charisma of that "prayed" history.
Obviously, the exhibition does not seriously plan to teach the viewer something, as it mentions different things and touches different strings in the soul - in an artistic way. Here, for example, is a comparison of the Moskva and Volga basins, illustrating the emergence of the Volga-Don Canal - so small that it will take a magnifying glass and patience to learn something, and a google map to match at least some contours. In a word, this is never a textbook. But the strings play as they want, and often one of the most sonorous is nostalgic. For example, 1971 illustrates the apogee of road construction, which is true: a huge number of roads and concrete bridges on large rivers were built at this time.
“New highways destroyed forests and villages, drove people from their long-lived places,” the authors say. And they did not destroy, and did not drive away, in any case they are not roads: such a number of forests, which is in our country, the highways cannot destroy, except that they can be shaded into a fine grid, which is hardly realistic. The road can become a problem for a separate Khimki forest, but not for forests in general - let's argue a little with the authors. And they drove people out of their homes not so much highways as the policy of "enlargement", which, in turn, itself destroyed a lot of roads, which were also "enlarged." That is, in fact, everything is more complicated, but the topic was stirred up. And here it is, a nostalgic note: village houses that disappeared under the Moscow Ring Road, a model by Sergei Topunov.
Of the interesting facts - guppy fish, released by someone into the river and taken root at the Kuryanovsk aeration stations: they have reborn, turned gray, and the beautiful tail has dried up. Two more fascinating stories: a video interview by director Ilya Davydov with diggers, who say, in particular, that illegal sewage runs are cut into a third of underground rivers. This video alone is worth visiting the exhibition.
Another video, unfortunately, is shortened - about the garbage fleet that Mayor Yuri Luzhkov launched on the Moscow River in 1998. He collects about 3000 m3 garbage, 20,000 m3 silt, 8000 liters of oil products”.
It is not out of place to mention a series of graduation projects from the Moscow Architectural Institute under the direction of Boris Eremin entitled “Moscow. Nature's Revenge”, 1991, where an important part was the idea of restoring natural landscapes and“removing the utilitarian burden from the river”. Student diplomas are a kind of precursors to Yuri Grigoryan's project,
winner in the competition for the concept of development of the coastal areas of the Moskva River in 2014.
Actually, this winning project serves as the core of the exhibition. He won the victory, but further development and adaptation of the concept took a more pragmatic path: for several years now, the Moscow Gradplan Institute has been working on the project, and, as far as we know, not all the bold environmental ideas of Grigoryan's winning project have been adopted. Water purification, in particular, is more traditional than with the help of algae - as a result, it is unlikely that an idyllic picture of fishermen in front of the Moscow Kremlin, which has become a symbol of the Meganom project, will become possible. There are no plans for any fishermen or bathers yet.
This is probably the reason for the emergence of the informal society Friends of the Moscow River, founded, as the explication says, “in 2018 by Yuri Grigoryan, Anna Kamyshan, Taisia Osipova and geographer Glafira Parinos”. The public manifesto is the highlight of the exhibition program, or it would be even more accurate to say that the entire exhibition is its creative illustration. It says: now the river “… is not just big and industrial, it is, in a sense, state-owned. a symbol of power, part of a postcard view of the Kremlin and an area of increased interest for law enforcement agencies This river does not serve factory machines [as it was before, - approx. Ed.] - but the mechanisms of power”. It also contains a call to return the river to "myself", according to Grebenshchikov, that is, to people: athletes, local residents, bathers, finally.
Sounds as bold as it is utopian. The authors - and there are, by the way, many of them - apparently, are aware of this and project events into the future deliberately utopian: after the manifesto follows the installation of Sergei Sitar 2019 with an insect in a plastic egg, and then immediately 2023 - “ports of the future, finally, they appear on the Moskva River "- and then the story develops as a fantasy novel, starting with the protest of bathers who are arrested by the Russian Guard, after which" hundreds of people went to the embankments of the Moskva River and staged massive bathing, claiming their right to the river. Why not a dream.
Later, sturgeons are launched into the river, which are caught by poachers; by 2088, sturgeons appear again, and they are guarded by a "super-hero, a native of amphibian farmers" named Yura [I just want to add: we know this person - author's note].
There, pearl shells multiply, which donate their pearls for the improvement of the city; and in 2050, bioactive substances give rise to "a dense suspension, a film that envelops objects and bathers immersed in water" [example: a bunch of finely branched algae under glass; who swam in the Volga during the flowering water, will understand me - approx. auth.].
And so on until 2119, gracefully closing the second century with the appearance of "Thinking about the River" - the Archimatik Bureau was responsible for this plot.
Let us note that there are more fictional stories than the “historical” half, as if the Friends of the Moscow River society seeks to change the future through its utopian fantasy or simply enjoys creativity.
What can I say - in 2011 the Friends of Zaryadye society appeared, and we know what happened next - they built the Zaryadye park. True, a government initiative intervened there. Is it possible to do something similar with a huge river, and even one that is under the close scrutiny of special services - life will show. So far, the project looks more like a cry of despair.
