Changing landscapes-3

Films in this program are addressed to a genius loci, the protective spirit of a place, the cultural and historical landscape paradigm of St. Petersburg – the city, that has changed its name, spirit and character more than once. Hero City, classical and revolutionary, cardboard and grand, faces of its past are multiple and illusory. 

St. Petersburg is an imaginary capital, with a vast number of myths and legends associated with the topology of the city. The city, that shifted day and night, is stretched along the grand promenades and Nevsky Prospekt, but conceals its insides in the courtyards of apartment houses and communal apartments, known as “Dostoevsky’s Petersburg”. These implicit traces are shown today through the cultural myths and stone surfaces. 

This paradoxical ambiguity of the cultural capital is represented by contemporary artists in the program. In the video work by Tanya Akhmetgalieva& Michaela Muchina mythical creatures like griffins and sphinxes, reborn as penguins, run down to the seashore from reality. 

The legendary battleship Aurora, a symbol of revolution, now confined to the dock, cuts animated waves out of the vast sea in the video by Maxim Svishev accompanied by the music of St. Petersburg avant-garde composer Oleg Karavaichuk. Another funny Aurora-Giraffe allegory is being transformed among different worlds and spaces in the video by Manya Alexeeva. 

In Alex Antipin’s work the numbers count the transitions between different historical, Soviet and post-Soviet layers of the city. The regular structure of streets and buildings is divided from abstract joints into grid cells forming a monotonous city in the video by Anton Khlabov. 

The figure of a poet is indeed a key to the city: from Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov to Oberiu and Silver Age poetry, paradoxical fates of writers, scholars and travelers are associated with St. Petersburg. The video by Ludmila Belova on Lev Gumilev, a scientist and author of passive theory of ethnogenesis, the son of Russian poets Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, is based on the artist’s research of archival materials. 

“What will it be like, if we won’t exist?” – sounds as a refrain in the soundtrack to Dimitri Lurie’s work, and white seagulls are flying over the coast of Kronstadt, St. Petersburg’s outpost, which saved the city several times. 

A lonely girl’s solo by Maya Popova echoes a rapid flight-dance by Edward Shelganov at Palace Square. Potpourri of croons in Olga Jurgenson’s video explodes with the atmosphere of Soviet festivals. Boris Kazakov’s pulsing rhythm of scratched b&w film catches and carries the spirit of the city, which is pretending to be asleep. 

Still one thing remains unclear throughout this whirlwind: what is the present, and what is the past; where is the truth in this flickering moire of familiar landscape.