CYLAND VIDEO ARCHIVE AND ANNA FRANTS’ INSTALLATION AT ALVAR AALTO LIBRARY

Film created as part of the program “Describing architecture” at the Hermitage Youth Education Center, and shown with the permission of the Hermitage Youth Education Center.

A research institute of robotics and technological cybernetics. In their video, the authors wanted to show the contrast between the past and the present; between the expectations that people once had in the institute building, in science, space and in the country as a whole, and modern realities. The artists also wished to stress that the future of the Savin tower is not necessarily pessimistic: the end of the clip contains a hopeful note that one day its former important function may be revived.

Music: Alexander Manotskov, “Anthemic variations”

A film that guides us through three architectural styles of Moscow: Stalinist empire, Soviet modernism and contemporary architecture, which does not have a definite style, but contains elements of the preceding ones. The inverted camera slowly drifts past familiar sites, creating an image of a sunny ghost city, drowning in a bottomless blue haze. The houses abandoned by inhabitants turn into pure celestial architecture and fill the streets with their music frozen in stone: the city itself sings an anthem to itself.

The Shukhov tower, a masterpiece by the great Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov, is crumbling, and is scheduled to be dismantled and removed from its historical location. The artist films the same landscape of roofs where the Shukhov tower dominates at different times of day and at different times of year, in order to preserve its memory.

This work is an elegiac meditation on the grandiose architecture of Dubai, the laborers who built the city in “half a generation”, and its pending environmental decline — a visual iteration of the manifest destiny of global capital. Emerging as a dystopic, soulless vision of the future, notions of civil society, individual rights, and identity are subsumed in the logic of capital. The video’s structure, ‘Eve Democracy’ character and sound remix are illuminated by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1+1 (Sympathy for the Devil), with its deliberate and inherent embrace of contradiction, which enables both a fractured narrative and a meta-narrative to operate simultaneously.

The artist travels through Russia, completing her journey in the town of Vyshny Volochok. She observes the changes that the city has experienced over the last decades. The town is a picture of a place abandoned to the whim of fate: canals with murky green water, crumbling granite embankments, a school that looks like it has been bombed, with empty window frames, and abandoned fields filled with hogweed. In the place of collapsed wooden houses, the ubiquitous red and green stores of the “Pyatyorchka” and “Magnit” chains move in, and a “Diksi” store has even occupied the former “Rodina” cinema.

The video takes its inspiration from the song “The Return of the Giant Hogweed”, released by the British rock group Genesis in 1971. The song warns of the apocalyptic spread of the poisonous plant Heracleum mantegazzianum (giant hogweed), after it was “captured” in the hills of the Russian Empire and brought to Britain by Victorian botanists. The lyrics of the songs are filled with ironic humor and describe an anthropomorphized plant which is on a mission to destroy the human race. The video “The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed” is an updated version of the story told in the Russian language, looking at the era of the cold war half a century later from the viewpoint of the giant hogweed itself, telling the story of its fall.

High technology enters the urban space, becoming part of it. Using the cinema 4D computer program, the  artist creates imaginary kinetic sculptural compositions – mutants of civilization, and places them in the environment of the modern city.