Violetta Gunina, Andrey Kalashnikov, Polina Korotaeva (Hermitage Youth Center)
Connections
Video (FHD), 00:03:10
Recording Architecture is an educational project of the Hermitage Youth Center within the exhibition “Golden Generation. Modernism in Finnish Architecture and Design'” (The State Hermitage, 14th of November 2015 till 31st of January 2016). The project is dedicated to the modernist architecture that is represented by the unique buildings of St. Petersburg and Vyborg. The participants of the project perceived in their own manner the atmosphere of the places visited. As a result each team created their own short film about one of the five unique examples of modernist architecture. Personal stories told using the modern era format – video, brings to life the buildings of the bygone generation.
Curators: Elizaveta Kaluzhskaia, Artemy Baranov
Connections
Architecture is always deeper than any aesthetics, because each building conserves the marks of the eras that witnessed and experienced. The Postal Workers House’s of Culture building is a totem of changing ideologies. It was erected and rebuilt as a symbol of the connection to God/Culture/Humanity, because the essence of any ideology is manifested in the connection to the any power that is incommensurable to a man.
And the connection changes with the every new period – the building’s look changes; the era dies – the building is being overthrown. Only the memory remains, which is not possible to rebuild or hide with a new facade. This memory is the internal, tectonic struggle of the Postal Workers House of Culture. Ideologies, eras, styles are linked into the unified out of style architecture, which has outlived the periods’ alternation and undoubtedly it will outlast more.
Which ideology will the spectator distinguish here today gazing at the shadows of fatigued green construction gauze, the mute blank windows, the faded plaster, the nostalgic bas-reliefs’ plastic and the misplaced signs on cracked walls? What’s about the future? The building is being in the foreboding state.