Translated material
Five -legged exercise of progress
This year, Colta.ru decided to go to the experiment and invited to temporary curators over the section “Photo projects” of young and talented representatives of leading Russian photocurium. We divided the calendar year between six curators and asked them to select the most interesting samples of modern Russian photography for publication.
Invited curators
Katerina Zueva , center of photography named after Brothers Lumier
Nadezhda Sheremetova , "Femicip"
Sergey Lostev , "House of Metenkov"
Daria Tuminas , Freelance Curator, Amsterdam
Anastasia Bogomolova , The Blog This a Photobook
Svetlana Taylor , British Higher School of Design
The fourth resident: Daria Tuminas is a freelance researcher, photographer and curator. In 2011, Tuminas graduated from the master's program “Theory of Cinema and Photography” at the University of Leiden with a diploma considering the narrative in photography. During the training, Daria was held an internship in Foam Magazine magazine in Amsterdam. In 2011-2014 Daria, together with Evgenia Sveshchinskaya, oversaw the program “Experience of Dutch photography”, which included a number of educational events and an exhibition about Dutch photography “Undercover” (exhibition platform - Museum of Modern Art “Erarta”), which received a silver prize at the European Deesign Award contest. In 2014, Daria overseas the project “Reading a photo book”, which included an exhibition, a seminar and a review competition for photo books (exhibition platform - a press gallery). At the moment, Daria is teaching at Fotofactory (Amsterdam), Webster University (Leiden), works in the Johan Deumens Gallery gallery (Amsterdam), writes about photographs and is working on several independent projects as a freelan field.
Daria Tuminas
“Invited curator” is a project of virtual space. I invited four Russian artists to the conversation, whose works somehow show the “virtual” essence of the city’s space. Utopic architectural plans - in the project "Five -nosed Trude Production" by Alexei Bogolepov. The city is not as a set of buildings, but as a space that exists in “reading” by people, “Museum of Skateboarding” by Kirill Savchenkov. “Complexity” of Yana Romanova - about the ownership of the territory of a certain country, about the status of the city (quite symbolic concept) and about what difficulties with the identification of both the “physical” city and people causes the mobility of this status. Elena Khulkina’s “grove” visualizes the history of a particular place, allows various temporary layers to coexist at one point and at one point, showing that space is only in dynamics, it is always in a state of transformation, rethinking, and the ability to become something else.
Alexey Bogolepov is a St. Petersburg artist working with the architecture and ideology of modernism both in the post -Soviet space and beyond. Personal exhibitions were held in the Gallery "Photode Department" in St. Petersburg (2015), the Museum of Architecture named after Shchuseva in Moscow (2014), ZSIA Zarya in Vladivostok (2016). Member of group exhibitions at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art (2015), center of photography. Lyumier brothers (2015), a shift center in Kazan (2014), parallel programs of the Moscow International Biennale of Young Art (2016) and the Biennale "Manifesto-10" (2014).
Daria Tuminas's conversation with Alexei Bogolepov
Daria Tuminas: I would like to talk about your last project “Five-toe Take of Progress”, on which you worked in the art “Dawn” on the basis of the Zarya Contemporary Art Center in Vladivostok in the spring of 2016. “Five -toe treading of progress” is a fictitious competition calling for architects to create the structure of the new communist city, Vladivostok. The competition was allegedly held in 1964 by the magazine "Bulletin of Architecture and Construction" in cooperation with the Moscow Architectural Institute and the Union of Architects of the USSR. Five finalists, five architectural utopias (six, if we consider another, existing only in the text and is a synthesis of all five). This project is installation: five objects representing utopias, and the text-report on the competition. However, the text rises on a par with objects - it itself is volume, design. It is very visual: “You can place people in a modular grid or launch human flows like rivers, like arrows, like flocks of birds, like plasma, like pollen, like mushroom cords, like a strawberry mustache. A true communist city may be unlike the city at all, and a genuine communist person can be unlike a person at all. ” In addition, the text gives rise to projection of forms and systems: a city on the water; Mobile apartment buildings; large -haired modular parallelogram nets; a city based on a traffic stream; A city, imbued with the spirit of organic synthesis ("ekomunism"). What led you to this text, which, in fact, is the basis of the project?
Alexey Bogolepov: Recently, I have read quite a lot of Soviet journalism - both according to the theory of architecture and a wider profile. On the example of texts of different years, one can observe the development and refraction of language and ideas during late socialism. However, the fact that they are all united is a harmonious formal structure. At some point, I realized that the texts, like the architecture of Soviet modernism, are primarily moving formal factors. Textual and ideological formalism within pre-set, extremely strict framework created in the Soviet architectural theory of the 1960s, similar to the theological discourse of late antiquity. Separately, it is worth noting the high probability of prosperity of various concepts that were in their disposition to the central line in the "heresies" position. Here, a picture of an ideologically constrained, but dynamically animated state, in which the city’s space, the space of form and the space of thought, flow into each other, is emerging. I decided to try to work in the conditions of these formal searches, fighting about the arbitrarily arranged framework, and wrote this article. That is, the fictional architectural competition for the Alternative General Plan of Vladivostok is called to help to recreate the conditions of thinking, characteristic of this specific and special time.
The text was exhibited with a disclaimer on the last page to give the viewer the opportunity to visit both conditions - faith in the possibility of the reality of this competition and the second state, when it is clear that this is a fiction. Fictitious was also mentioned in the general text to the exhibition, i.e. It was announced many times, but it is clear that not everyone read these things in the same order.
Tuminas: Why did the decision arise repeatedly mention fictitious? There was no idea to pass the text for the genuine?
Bogolepov: I just wanted to pay attention to the complexity of distinguishing between authenticity and fictitious, their multiple impositions, so characteristic of Soviet reality. In this case, the authenticity of the text (as, in fact, its meaning) is not as important as its formal organization. This is the moment I often turn to. The presentation itself (stylized layout, print) simultaneously refers to the artifacts of the research process and helps to emphasize the all -pervalitating priority of the form.
Tuminas: You mentioned an interesting idea that the formalism of the Soviet architectural theory of the 60s is similar to the theological discourse of late antiquity. Can you tell you more? And what exactly do you mean by the “formal organization of the text” - language, style, composition, format of the “jury report on the competition”?
Bogolepov: Speaking of formalism, we can talk about bringing facts to an ideological base, which by that time crystallized in clear formal schemes, equally applicable to sociology, geopolitics and language turns. Often they recall the example of the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that plant processes were obliged to be consistent with the main provisions of Marxism. The teleological a priori of the Manichaean Marxist concept, mirror formulations with constant propositions of obvious “syntheses”, harmless self -criticism, which offers to solve problems the same measures that it criticizes - these rhetorical turns can be easily represented in the form of schemes and formal diagrams. In my opinion, their role was not to lead to any conclusions with real consequences, but to build a formal structure of the argument that provides a primacy that Alexei Yurchak in the recently translated into the Russian book “It was forever”, referring to Jacques Lacan, calls “dominant” (“ M Aster- Signifier ") , In this case, a certain nucleus of Marxist-Leninist ideas. Both in structure and function, it is close to apophatic theology, which is proved by the existence of God through the denial of everything that is not, or to the apologetics, which puts forward the retrospective justifications of the Absolute. That is, by the formal organization, it is precisely the general scheme of the location of ideological accents and their resolution, which, of course, is a mutated dialectical triad.
Tuminas: Another of your formulation, important, in my opinion, for talking about architecture, is “an all -pervalitating priority of form”. It sounds like a very clearly formed principle. It is based, apparently, your personal theory lies, where the form is opposed to something and for some reason has priority. So: what is it opposed to you and why is it a priority?
Bogolepov: If we talk about photography, I am rather interested in describing scripts, places and events where the priority of the form is observed. Some processes and phenomena (such as entropy, self -organization, symmetry, self -sovereign) are simply better visible in such conditions. However, I am also interested in modern speculative models that work out the desul -subject methods of registering reality. One of the main issues that are interested in speculative realists is what the world is before our view of it? As the first step to the answer, it can be assumed that the form of things, their configuration is one of the few, and possibly their only objective property that exists before we observers begin to endow things with meanings, interpretations and a place in the hierarchies. That is, I would reformulate your question from contrasts in a common interest in an objectively existing one. Working with a form is just working with what is guaranteed to be. With all this, I do not have myself the hope that a person as a whole and an artist in particular is destined to achieve absolute objectivity without leaving his skull. But you can maintain interest in this, and maybe behave as if it had already happened.
Tuminas: Please tell us about forms present in the "five -legged do -it -yourself progress." This is not a world to a human look at him. This is a world created by a "look." What is this designs?
Bogolepov: These are architectural layouts, which can also be called speculative reconstructions. They in a simplified form demonstrate organizational and programmatic principles of architectural projects in the text of the article. On the one hand, they themselves come from textual descriptions, secondary in relation to the text; On the other hand, the text describes them. The materials from which the objects are made - different layout cardboard, paper, rubber - also contribute to the form of models, determining the possible and most likely formal moves and techniques of handling them.
Tuminas: When you were developing five plans, did you proceed from specific existing architectural ideas or developments?
Bogolepov: Almost all of these plans have real analogues - not in the sense of specific projects, but in the sense of the general spectrum of utopian architectural ideas, then hovering in the air. This is the activities of famous experimental studios (walking cities of Archigram groups), and the work of Japanese metabolists, and all kinds of global concepts, almost all of which, as far as I know, are referred to the "ekumenopolis" of Konstantinos Doxiadis. I wanted to preserve the general “spirit of time”, and if more ambitious - to reduce some similar ideas to their abstract principles and offer their classification. Again, it doesn’t matter how this classification is reality: the main thing is that it has a harmonious formal structure. This is also a sign of discourse of the era.
Tuminas: Based on the materials you read, articles on the architecture of the Soviet period, how much the logic of such a competition was possible: with planning on the scale of the whole city, with an open competition, a public representation of projects in the journal? In general, how much in practice, and not just in theoretical models, the architecture of the 60s looked at the city as a whole, solved architecture problems systematically?
Bogolepov: Competitions on the concepts of the development of cities and on the layout of new settlements in the Soviet Union were really held, as well as contests for the reconstruction of Moscow, its individual units and sign buildings. There was nothing like this in Vladivostok - it was a closed military city. Nevertheless, a book fell into my hands about the master plans of Vladivostok from the 19th century to our days, which I was in many ways guided. It very clearly visible changes in scope, radicality and specific planning solutions for decades. I must say that the Titanic Bridge through the Amur Bay spoke since the 60s. The utopism of the official general plans did not go too far beyond the scope of decency, but still every time significantly exceeded economic realities. And this gap between the planned and realized only increased throughout the stagnation and perestroika. Constant delay and transfers are not unique to modern Russia.
It is worth saying that the tradition of utopian architecture is still tightly rooted in the academic environment. Today it is often considered as a field for formal exercises on a scale and integrated into the concept of sustainable development (also far from new). For example, graduates of the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Far Eastern Federal University, recently located in the new campus on the island of Russian, regularly perform similar projects, including bridges through the Amur Bay . True, already hung with solar panels.
Tuminas: In your work as a whole there is a tendency to transition from photography and 2D to objects and 3D . At first, a purely photographic “block”, then the “Ritual of Efficiency”, where you put the layout on the installation of the layout, and, finally, the “five -legged exercise of progress” is the first project where there is absolutely no direct photograph, but there are objects. It is clear that the logic of the subject of the study itself leads you along this trajectory. But will this trajectory develop further and how?
Bogolepov: Both voluminous works and their photographs - all one way or another belong to a cultural layer called "Architectural Propedic". This is a preparatory discipline, a student of basic work with form, composition and space. It goes root at the first modernist educational institutions - Bauhaus and Vhutemas. The influence of the modernist propaedeutics on the urban environment of the post -Soviet space is huge. Many formal techniques of Soviet architects and urban planners are “groped” and mastered precisely during work with paper and cardboard. These modest materials dictate possible forms or make their tectonic adjustments to the intentions of architects. Further, all this is reproduced in brick or concrete, taking into account the properties of this group of materials. The angular, inhospitable forms of late Soviet buildings appeared in this anonymous involvement of the silent voice of materials and propaedeutic exercises, not burdened by worries about demand and consumption.
You probably correctly noticed this trend. At some point, the photograph itself was simply missing. Although I can hardly abandon it completely - simply because architectural photography has always occurred in our understanding and perception of architecture. Most of the buildings we know about, we know precisely from the photographs. But when it comes to reverse engineering or voluminous demonstration, I strive to use any available means. I think that in the future I would like to work with the real practice of construction, especially at those points where the concepts of form and function are problematized. I am also interested in the general theory of the organization - later a child of modernism, providing a frame not only for architectural thinking, but also for institutional and state construction.