Dopo diversi anni di lavori domani apre finalmente il grande complesso della V–A–C Foundation a Mosca con un intervento di grande recupero storico dell'architetto italiano Renzo Piano.
Si tratta di un grande polo culturale, ricavato in una antica ex centrale elettrica di Mosca, che raccoglierà diverse funzioni e attività culturali, con auditorium, sale mostre, conferenze, laboratori e cinema.
La Fondazione ha anche una sede in Italia a Venezia che da diversi anni produce interessanti mostre.
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V–A–C Foundation’s new permanent site in Moscow, ‘GES-2 House of Culture’, will open its doors to the public on 4 December 2021.
GES-2 House of Culture is a disused power station, built in 1907, situated on the Bolotnaya Embankment in the popular Red October district in the centre of Moscow. After its acquisition by V–A–C in 2015, Renzo Piano Building Workshop were commissioned to design the conversion of the main building and adjacent area, based on the intention to preserve the original building as much as possible and turn it into a new urban cultural space.
GES-2 House of Culture is an accessible space for people to meet and experience culture together, featuring a cinema and concert hall, a library, shops, a restaurant and café, a playground, workshops, studios and an artist residency block, exhibition halls and an auditorium for public events and performances.
GES-2 aspires to re-imagine traditional Russian ‘houses of culture’, recreational centres that first came about in the late 19th century and which are still popular today. These cultural spaces set out to encourage people to engage with the arts and actively participate in culture. GES-2 aims to do the same, inviting artists from a wide variety of disciplines: choreography,
music, theatre, cinema, design and visual arts to work together and act as a storyteller. The first story, entitled Holy Barbarians, will develop over five seasons exploring the territory of modern Russian culture, engaging concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘mother’ and ‘cosmos’, clichés through which Russia is often perceived. GES-2 will invite artists and audiences alike to make sense of these ideas and provide them with new form and meaning.
GES-2 House of Culture opens with the season, Santa Barbara (4 December 2021 – 13 March 2022), named after the first Western soap opera that aired on Russian television for a whole decade, from 1992 to 2002. It was widely popular and is said to have had a significant impact on the shaping of postSoviet life.
Santa Barbara – A Living Sculpture by Ragnar Kjartansson is the key project of the season, a durational performance by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Together with the director Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir and a Russian cast and crew, Kjartansson will reshoot 98 episodes of the soap opera in Russian, in front of a live audience while also streaming the footage in a special area. Viewers are invited to travel back to the early days of postSoviet Russia through the performance, and to reflect on the images, values and ideas that have survived and are still relevant today.
Two exhibitions are presented at GES-2 alongside Santa Barbara. The first, When Gondola Engines Were Taken to Bits: A Carnival in Four Acts, owes its title to the song Carnival.net by legendary Russian rock band Mumiy Troll and comprises an exhibition, a rave, a series of stand-up shows and a dance procession. It presents new work by Russian artists who are turning to carnival culture today, combining images, costumes and staged photographs from the last thirty years. In the 1990s, these works crossed the boundaries of expression and marked a new era in what was considered acceptable in the public display of one’s identity.
