All the troubles on earth come from a lack of imagination. Do you remember the old Soviet cartoon "Lost and Found"? Its heroes found various valuable things and, in order to return them to their owners, opened the Lost and Found Office. This is the first association that comes to mind...

All the troubles on earth are from a lack of imagination

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Do you remember the old Soviet cartoon "Lost and Found"? Its heroes found various valuable things and, in order to return them to their owners, opened the Lost and Found Office. This is the first association that comes to mind when you get to the Lost and Found exhibition in the gallery of the Mukha club. Here are collected objects made from old things, only not lost, but simply not needed by anyone, from things that should have been thrown away a hundred years ago, but miraculously survived and now caught the eye of contemporary Moscow artists.

Each object has its own destiny, its own metamorphoses, its own relationships with other objects - in general, a whole life. The objects on display give the audience absolute joy: a lamp arranged in an old teapot, which stands on a stove and gradually heats up (Egor Arseniev); a plastic violin playing Beethoven (Olga Sanchuk); a large iron plate, on which a whole cloud of old bottles, scissors, corks, nuts, hairpins and buttons is glued, screwed, soldered, called “Fog. Morning" (Sergei Meituv). At the opening of the exhibition, everyone was invited to bring with them an old unnecessary thing, which for some reason it is a pity to throw away. There was a workshop for the creative processing of potential scrap into works of art. This action was carried out by the workshop of the same name "Lost and Found". Actually, such a workshop exists in Moscow for the second year.

Agree, all this is very attractive, so the next day I was already in the workshop itself on Smolensky Boulevard. This is the kind of place where you can find a gift for any occasion and even order something related to a particular person. For example, a watch embedded in a diving mask, or a bracelet specially curved from a spoon.

Perhaps it is true that all the troubles on earth come from a lack of imagination. What is not here: a clock from a headlight, from a vinyl record, from an ammeter, from a tin can; a wooden angel with a keyhole on its belly - a guardian angel; floor lamps with stands made of oboes, clarinets; clay folding postcards; photo frames made from bicycle chains; a bracelet made from the keys of an old typewriter; pillow for sweet dreams with fabric sweets contained inside; lamps in teapots, and in a variety of them, etc.

At the entrance to the workshop there is a large hat box with sweets. “Help yourself,” says master Sasha. And he tells the story of how one old woman who lives nearby brought this box and wanted to sell it (here they accept and sometimes buy various unnecessary things from the population). The box was bought from an old woman for 150 rubles, but the next day the money for it was returned. The old woman returned and said that the box contains so many memories that it cannot cost any money, by definition, because it is priceless, and therefore she decided to give the box as a gift. Since then, the round box has become a container for sweets.

“The very idea of ​​creating this workshop,” says one of its founders Yegor Arseniev, “appeared about two years ago. My artist friend Yura Demidov rented a dacha in Abramtsevo in the summer, and there in the attic there was a bunch of junk that had to be thrown away, but it was a pity to throw it away; and I, a former businessman tired of publishing, came to see him. Together we began to make all sorts of things out of this junk - birthday gifts for friends. Then off we go. It turned out that it was very cool to take some old thing in hand, combine it with another, find some new, third meaning in their combination. For example, how do you get an angel? A piece of wood is taken, wings made of wire are nailed to it, carnations are driven in instead of a halo, and a large keyhole is screwed in the center of the body. And suddenly, no one knows how, in your hands this whole set of useless objects turns into an angel.

Are angels your favorite topic?

- Yes. And they are very different. People especially like angels with doorknobs and carnations. They turn out to be more angels than stylized and pictorial-like figurines. We recently made an angel with a thermometer - he is responsible for the atmosphere.

- And why do your angels live in cases from old watches?

— It seems interesting and important to me that shelves for angels are exactly like that. After all, watch cases are watches without time. Such a metaphysical image, but it is not so difficult to make it.

- In general, turn on your imagination - and act with your hands.

- Right. It is very important that a person does something with his own hands. We even have an idea to open a ceramic workshop for children and several workshops for adults in Moscow, where all kinds of people could come and mold jugs there. So that even if you do not know how to do this, you can still come and learn from the master. After all, it is a great pleasure to mold a jug with your own hands. And then take it and give it to someone. Or paint first, and then give.

- So, you are going to expand your field of activity?

- We just want to create our own world, consisting of objects made by hand. We will participate in exhibitions, perhaps we will hold exhibitions in the provinces. Moscow in this sense is a very inert city. Here people are more busy with other things. But after all, every person has a mood when he wants to take and do something with his own hands. That's how I once got tired of doing business, design, printing. I think there is a rebirth going on right now. People overvalue materials. They take and, for example, make a postcard out of clay, instead of a pretentious chair they put a street bench at home. Two very intelligent and quite wealthy people wanted to do something good for our workshop, and they brought here a street bench - the same one on which we are sitting. Master Sasha came here to change the lock, and he stayed with us.

- He told me that he especially likes to make watches from a variety of objects.

- I like it too. You see, with endless technology and computers, people are missing something real. I think the idea of ​​such a workshop has been hanging in the air for a long time, I wanted to get away from the newfangled high-tech, to do something not glossy, but rather rough.

And there is such a moment: many people are very fond of finding something, digging, rummaging through grandmother's junk. With the help of this workshop, for example, I got an excuse why I need to go to all sorts of flea markets. Here in these crumpled samovars we will plant flowers and cover the entire window sill with them. This is a gorgeous pot!

How many people work in your workshop?

- Constantly - six people. There are craftsmen who figure out what to do and how to do it themselves, and there are those to whom Yura and I set a specific task of what should be done and how. Often we invent, and the masters do. Artists who bring finished pieces tend to bring something very neat and sleek, they are used to working for art salons and markets. In that sense, I don't always like artistic things.

- It turns out that professionalism is not the main thing?

- I even like non-professional things more - they have some kind of piercing honesty. It can be seen when people do their job with love and sincerity.

I'll tell you what adults want to find in all these things. People really want to find the joy that they experienced in childhood, they want to return to childhood. Again, paintball, karting, parachutes. Games. Adults sometimes want to be children, because the brightest moments in life are in childhood. Why are all these things more difficult for artists? Because they are playing adulthood, they are afraid to do nonsense. In this sense, businessmen tired of their work are our people. They already have everything, and now they want something real, they want to do something with their own hands. Because they have villas and Mercedes, but the feeling of happiness from this has not increased. Such a dad sits and plays with the child in the sandbox, makes secrets - candy wrappers under pieces of glass, as in childhood. These people are ours. They are ready to play the fool. I've been through it all. Business, diving, paragliding. But I feel a real buzz when I make a coaster from the designer for these watches on the bank. This is a feeling from childhood, and after all, the fingers remember how to hold the screw when you tighten the nut.