On March 13, at the MARCH Architectural School, training on the PRO intensive "Exposition Design" begins. The course will introduce students to the possibilities that a designer, architect or exhibition curator has, and will allow them to analyze the constraints they face when working in a museum or urban space. Individually and in groups, listeners will create projects of expositions for real sites: the Gilyarovsky Center - a branch of the Museum of Moscow, the M. A. Bulgakov Museum, the ON. Nekrasov.
Course curator, exhibitor and museum designer Yegor Larichev explains why limitations are hidden opportunities.
Since the introduction of restrictive measures due to the pandemic, exhibitions have become a risky endeavor for architects, designers and curators, not to mention experts, journalists and the public. Thus, excitement returned to them (to us, to you!), A possible impossibility freed consciousness from the pressure of reality, and everything became possible. Or almost everything. Therefore, in 2021, we decided to devote the PRO intensive "Exposition Design" to limitations. Tough, consistent, sometimes painful, but returning a sense of reality to the profession. For fourteen weeks of the I / We / you course we will be doing exhibitions in various cultural institutions, each time encountering certain limitations: given or, even more interesting, arising along the way.
And the first limitation should be the set limitation: below, I suggest ten character traits or professional deformations that can prevent you from becoming an exhibition designer. Look at them soberly and say to yourself, "No, this course is not for me."
1. Inability to be surprised. If everything is clear to you in advance, exhibition design is not for you. Preparation of an exhibition - a minefield or a maze of possibilities, from which side to look.
2. You are the ideal mother or the ideal father. Dog breeder or cat lady. There is a chance that relatives simply will not understand why you return home after eleven for three months in a row three times a week, and spend the rest of the evenings at the computer and books, and the pets will stop communicating with you.
3. Lack of empathy. If you are not touched by the content, it is better not to touch it.
4. Absent-mindedness. Working on an exhibition is akin to reading a book, the plot of which you need to tell the audience using museum items. How to do this if you have forgotten what you read?
5. You don't like the feeling of risk. An exhibition is always a test of some hypothesis on the verge of a foul. Sometimes a construct that is logical at the beginning turns out to be self-destructive at the end of the search. And you need to come up with something new, and sometimes with your shoulder to support a lopsided idea.
6. You are allergic to museum dust. This is, of course, a personal drama, but it's just dangerous!
7. You are hiding in a museum from modern times. We pick you out of there along with the museum dust. Our task is to understand how modernity can be reflected in a museum today. In this sense, exhibitions are the pulse of the era. Uneven, sometimes just threadlike, but it exists, and we must listen to it.
8. Critical attitude to contemporary exhibition reality. More precisely, its absence. The course is a dialogue, criticism and exchange of judgment. If we have nothing to talk about, the dialogue will fail.
9. You think that working in the field of exhibitions will make you rich. No, it will not make it rich. Or rather, this is not what we teach.
10. You have an ironclad logic. We practice the Cartesian view of things and question everything, including iron logic - this is the golden rule. It helps to reveal hidden intuitions and reveal to the world the essence of deep cultural processes.
Of course, these are not all restrictions. If you want more - come to the course.
Egor Larichev
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zooming 1/4 Exhibition "0.8.5" in the Museum of the History of the GULAG, which was created by the students of the first course of the course in March 2020 © Photo courtesy of the press service of MARCH
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zooming 2/4 Exhibition "0.8.5" in the Museum of the History of the Gulag, which was created by the students of the first course of the course in March 2020 © Photo courtesy of the press service of MARCH
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zooming 3/4 Exhibition "0.8.5" in the Museum of the History of the GULAG, which was created by the students of the first course of the course in March 2020 © Photo courtesy of the press service of MARCH
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zooming 4/4 Exhibition "0.8.5" in the Museum of the History of the Gulag, which was created by the students of the first course of the course in March 2020 © Photo courtesy of the press service of MARCH