Re:centering Periphery|Ogino Knauss

Video working notes for the Berlin episode “Periphery at the Center”. Shot in 2012 in Friedrichshain – Ostbahnhof, with a soundtrack composed by Miki Semascus

The area around Ostbanhof in Berlin is a clear example of how in this city the typical categories of centre / periphery, downtown / suburbia are unable to describe the reality of the urban fabric. Vacant lots, huge plattenbauten settlements, retail chains, warehouses and abandoned industrial buildings: the typical landscape that we are used to associate with suburban districts are in fact few hundred meters from the very center of the city. Still their state is that of spaces of possibility, although the action of real estate developers is quickly taking over  the place imposing an ordinary and banal vision for the future Berlin.

Since our involvement as invited artists with the Moskonstruct campaign, and later with RKM, where we took care of the communication and graphic design of the EU funded cooperation project, we have found ourselves involved in the issue of preserving the heritage of modernist architecture.  Our project and blog have also become a sounding board for campaigns and petitions. This is a quite puzzling matter for us, who  have developed our approach to the urban exploring and sometimes colonising intersticial spaces, practicing psycho geographical derives and critical reappropriation of abandoned spaces. In the course of the time, we have been attracted by the decadence of spaces which represented past social and political organisation forms and by their organic potential as fields of transformation, rather than idealising their architectural embodiment as an heritage to preserve.

Reconstruction project of Nikolaev’s Textile Industry Hostel

Our relation with modern architecture is definitely critical, starting from an initial assumption of its ideology as a planetary-scale failure which provided field for the establishment and continuation of social injustice, domination and segregation. In the course of our wandering into the dilapidated territories of the modern city, our sentiment has definitely shifted, becoming more nuanced and intrigued as if a sort of Stockholm syndrome had taken over us. It is however evident that modernism in architectural and planning terms contains all the elements of the modern society’s contradiction, being at once a revolutionary utopian elán and a reactionary tool of restoration and oppression, expressing  both formal beauty to a superhuman extent and ugliness that borders on the sexy. In any case, the legacy of modern architecture has always been approached by ogino:knauss as a fertile territory to metabolise, an open field for the practices of the everyday to reinvent  social relations and re-enhance autonomous agency. Therefore, we feel a little uncomfortable when the discourse is restricted to the pure issue of preserving architectural masterpieces.

Nikolaev’s Textile Industry Hostel

This contradiction totally exploded in the context of Moscow, creating an internal debate  within OK and often challenging our solidarity with the organizations who commissioned our work. In the biased social landscape of today’s Russia, the discussion about the fate of  the architectures surviving the constructivist season often masks complex power struggles and economic interests, focusing on how to extract value from properties in the exploitative capitalist logic pervading the new Russian society. It totally neglects the social and political heritage of a movement which was originally aimed at providing the physical ground for a radical reorganization of social relations in a communitarian and progressive perspective. Often in Moscow this becomes also the business of private persons claiming the intellectual heritage of their progenitors, sometimes literally of sons and grandsons of architects struggling to transmit the artistic heritage of their relatives after the oblivion on their work imposed by the soviet history. While doing so, they also sometimes tend to privatise the intellectual heritage of extraordinariliy talended figures that nevertheless matured their personal talent in a storm of collective thinking, during a unique and short season in which the whole formed by the collective intellectual interaction was vastly exceeding the sum of the sigle players contribution. Contamination of ideas and mutual exchange, even in the form of disagreement and opposition, was feeding the overwhelming production of new tools and ideas following the avantgard’s boiling in the revolutionary cauldron. Mayakowski’s poetry is indissolubly intertwined with Rodcenko’s poetics, with Stepanova’s layout, with Dziga Vertov rhythm, with Okhitovich’s theory, with Gizburg’s verve, and so on… The risk is their heirs to disassemble what the fathers manoeuvred to put together, trying to reclaim it as copyrighted parts of  intellectual property. We saw the flowering of small family run foundations dedicated to promote the heritage of various costructivist figures, certainly for the sake of restituting them the cultural substance that they produced, but also contradicting their will to provide the people with a socialised (socialist) wealth by transforming their intellectual production in a commodity. Such a tendency is also reflected in the familistic attitude of certain Russian academia, with the dynastic tendency of scholars defending disciplinary niches and transmitting their positions and study fields to their sons, outlining the self reproduction of a defensive intellectual bourgeoisie which managed to cross relatively unaffecteed 80 years of (counter)revolutions.

Alexei Ginzburg’s model for the restoration of the Narkomfin

This picture is perfectly reflected in the Narkomfin’s story, which has became the main plot of  our film. Here, the interests of those pledging for the restoration of the Narkomfin collided with those of the inhabitants, which clearly understood that they would have never found place in the renovated building. As the developer who bought most of the apartments to redevelop it into a luxury boutique-hotel frankly put it, the inhabitants have no role in Narkomfin’s fate: this is a game between the private company owning the apartments and the public institutions owning the building. Moscomansledie, the municipal agency in charge of preserving cultural heritage, by its part does not seem at all interested in taking care of the survival of the building, as it demonstrated by  leaving it dilapidate for decades, neglecting even the proposal of practical intervention advanced by international institutions worrying about the fate of the Constructivist masterpiece. Rather it looks like the Moscow institutions interest lies in clearing away the site from human interferences, if  not from the building itself, given the incredibly high value of the land plot with great investment potential in a central position. On the other front, the private company MIAN acquired  most of the property with at least a partial interest in its quality as an architectural masterpiece, but obviously subordinated the restoration of the building to its redevelopment as a profitable enterprise. In doing so, it established a cultural foundation, involving scholars committed with heritage preservation and the grandson of Moisei Ginzburg himself in designing the renovation project. Project which on one hand proposes the restoration of the original form of the Narkomfin as designed by Ginzburg, including the piloti loggias filled already in the 1930s with apartments to respond  to the dwelling crisis; on the other, transforms it into a luxury hotel totally betraying the communitarian (if not communist…) spirit of the original project. Myopic pragmatism and faithful adherence to formal elements of the architectural style mark the tepid support of  preservationist institutions to such a plan. Should therefore  have we supported the residents’ position against the plans? Well, certainly our personal approach siding in principle community struggles suggested us to take their side, but in the end, the majority of them  revealed to be to there to defend their private property  form intruders like homeless squatting empty apartments or artists temporary occupying the former collective rooms for public events, and bargaining to exchange their property for more suitable apartments in an equally valuable urban location. Not that we want to stygmatise their struggle to defend their rights, but in the end, in this story we found that what was totally missed by all parts was the walue of the building as the heritage of an age of hope into new social horizons and justice. And how in the end we put it in our film, who does care today of this heritage?

Berlin is a city built on sand. And under the sand, water. A lot of water, which requires to be pumped away every time you need to create or consolidate  foundations for a building. The  ever changing landscape of the city is marked by the raveling of pink and blue pipes bringing the water towards channels or the Spree river. A sort of odd renal system of the city, constantly draining out the soil and indicating the slow. lazy, constant transformative work characterising Berlin’s identity.

Periphery at the Center – Friedrichshain- Ostkreuz 2011.

Filmed and edited by Manuela Conti – Oginoknauss

Sountrack by Miki Semascus

We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the death of the architect Konstantin Melnikov,

and the importance and value of his built works and the projects he drew has not stopped

growing over all these years. Melnikov’s visionary projects were decades ahead of their

time: now, when new technologies are beginning to make them feasible, they exert an

ever‐increasing influence on today’s architecture. It is no surprise that many people, not

just architects, travel to Moscow each year to visit his extraordinary workers clubs or his

remarkable house on Krivoarbatskii Lane, just off the Arbat.

However, despite the long period of time that has elapsed since Melnikov’s death, and

even the death of the state that first supported and then persecuted him, his legacy

remains largely inaccessible. Extremely important drawings and documents both from

Melnikov’s private archive and from the holdings of official institutions are closed to

researchers and scholars. Many of his extant buildings are in very poor condition or have

been severely deformed by needless and destructive “modernizations,” while others face

the threat of demolition. His remarkable cylindrical home, situated in the very heart of

Moscow, remains in the hands of the architect’s granddaughter, Ekaterina Karinskaia.

However, she lacks funds to maintain it, or to respond to the endless enquiries from official

bodies, professional groups, and interested parties. Promises to restore the house, open a

museum in adjacent buildings, and assist the family have been made, repeated, and then

forgotten.

Because Stalin’s Union of Architects cut Konstantin Melnikov’s career short in the 1930s,

his influence in Russia has been limited, at least until recently. But worldwide, many of his

buildings and projects have become paradigms of modern architecture as a whole.

The signatories to this letter seek the preservation of the Melnikov house as a public

museum and the fair compensation of the Melnikov family for their efforts to preserve it

over the forty years since the architect’s death. They seek, further, for all archival

materials in Russia that relate to Melnikov to be preserved in one place, preferably at a

museum adjacent to the house, where they will be open to architects, scholars, and the

educated public.

We appreciate the complexities of ownership and control which both the house and

archival documents present, but trust that a way will be found to resolve these issues. Only

recently President Putin has spoken of the need for modern Russia to embrace, protect,

and build upon its heritage. We believe that the work of Konstantin Melnikov offers a

unique possibility for today’s Russia to do precisely this. In doing so, Russians will also be

embracing, and protecting part of the world’s heritage, and enabling people everywhere to

join them in appreciating and building upon it.

With the screenings in Berlin and Prato we had the opportunity to see for the first time in sequence the two films we realised under the Re:centering Periphery  label. We found ourselves together with a great number of friends, whose feedback has been very helpful to reflect on the outcomes and gave us the opportunity to formulate some considerations about the advancement of the project and its coherence.  We want to share these through this post.

The first consideration is that the project, although born in a sort of casual way, developing more from random chances to explore certain places and topics than from a planned  sequence of case studies, still keeps a definite coherence. This is due firstly to a certain “regard” that the collective developed through almost 20 years of urban explorations, what we called the urban dermatology approach, which has its own coherence and provides a developed set of  tools of analysis and representation. Secondly, it is due to the conceptual framework of Re:centering periphery which works well: on one side it is enough open and inclusive to capture a wide set of phenomena connected with modern living and spatial development without being excessively specialistic  in its language and focus; on the other it identifies the importance of some specific relations among phenomena often analysed in separata sede, like for instance the relation between urban design and propaganda – what we have finally labeled “imagined and built landscapes”; the transversal and coherent contribution of modernist architectural and planning ideology to both the seemingly conflicting communist and capitalist societies during last century; or,  the relation among the highly  standardised and industrialised design and production of urban peripheries and the political instances of power, marginalisation and redistribution of resources; and finally, the everyday-life practices of the inhabitants transforming  and reinventing those spaces. From this perspective, RCP works in providing a street-level perspective to look at global phenomena (modern urbanization), and leaves space for  surprise and the unexpected…

However, the two films are quite different. First, because there is a clear technical improvement both in the format and in the language. Second, because the social, environmental and political context where they have been shot is quite different, and they clearly  show the necessity of adopting different solutions and languages. Third, because they have been realised with different timing and depth of engagement: the first, in Cuba, was completely shot within one trip, five weeks of full immersion in a totally unknown place; while the second, in Moscow, has been the collateral product of a series of trips connected to different works on commission, from which we have been able to spare some time to develop our voluntary project; but on the other hand, this limited and influenced the topics and places explored in Moscow to what was consistent with the task we were committed within the RKM campaign.

Ultimately, Dom Novogo Byta introduced some stylistic innovation respect to Doble Forza. If the latter is basically the diary of an urban exploration which deploys almost unprocessed fragments of video, including shots of archive footage shot directly at the moviola, and mapping workshops made with local inhabitants, the more difficult and opaque setting of Moscow forced us to adopt more elaborated solutions and to introduce new elements that we were not used to:  a voice over providing a narrative thread, the massive use of archival material, the introduction of a fictional character reading excerpts form literary works, that is a novel by Bulgakov read by an actor. Nevertheless, we do not feel the introduction of these new elements as a deviation from our approach and language, rather as an expansion of  the usual expressive palette consistent with our language. Again, the story is narrated as the diary of a personal exploration, including our usual obsessions and  idyosincracies. The novel by Bulgakov is one of the preparatory readings that anticipated and accompanied our trip to Moscow. The young actor reading it  in the film is like almost everything else the result of an accident: a nice young guy stopping in the metro to ask if we needed help finding our way, quickly enlisted in the project. The archive material has been the everyday matter of our parallel work for the RKM campaign. Finally, the voice over is the direct consequence of the opacity and elusiveness of Russian society, which revealed very difficult to be narrated simply through images captured in situ. And all over, the difficulty with Russian language , which forced us to tell with our words many things that we thought should be said but were not evident from our images and interviews.

Rather, aside from the many new elements introduced in DNB, we find that the two film have a logical consequentiality and a coherence as  common parts of an overall project. First of all, the process through which they have been created is similar. Both films have their origin in the invitation to realise a site specific artwork for an exhibition. In both cases, the artwork has been the occasion to drift with flaneuse attitude into unknown places and to develop  a first instinctive relationship with the matter, that has been subsequently investigated with more systematic approach. In both cases the first artwork has been also the stage in which soundscapes and sound materials have been processed and elaborated in the form of a musical composition, which constituted an important basis for drafting the successive montage of images and topics.

Furthermore, the serendipity in the process of selection of the subjects of the films let nevertheless emerge connections and parallels between the two locations and histories. In Cuba the random starting point of our navigation into the history of modernist urbanization has been the dream of a self built city, launched in the 1970′s by Fidel Castro involving collectives of workers realising their own homes (microbrigadas). They had inherited a rudimentary prefabricated concrete panel technology from USSR. In the second film we had the opportunity to jump back at the dawn of soviet revolution and of the search for technological solutions to the dwelling problem of an increasingly urbanized society, to discover the incredible blossoming of ideas and new visions produced by the avant-gards: among which, the important contribution of constructivist architects to the international debate about modern city and architecture, and the rupture brought by Stalin with the perversion and marginalization of their ideas. In both cases, artist and intellectuals still inhabit and reclaim those spaces, as the Omni Zona franca collective in Alamar, which constitutes one of the most lively voices in the cultural landscape of Cuba today, or the marginalized artists which try to recuperate the cultural significance of the Narkomfin in today’s Russia, neglected between the interests of politicians, developers, cultural institutions and even residents of the building struggling for their material survival. Finally, in both locations, the built environment produced by progressive ideologies appears as defeated by the course of history and abandoned to degradation and contempt; if in Moscow there is some minimal attempt at protecting the architectural heritage and valorising it in the context  of new economic approaches – renewal for cultural and touristic  business –  no attention at all is showed for the value of the social utopia they originally wanted to represent: collectivisation, self management, reform of the bourgeoise family organisation… a defined research question emerge fro the prosecution of the project: is there still place for social imagination in the triumphant and imploding capitalist world?

Finally, we are moving on toward next steps in the exploration. It is again the contingency  of opportunities more than a definite plan guiding us to work on Belgrade and Berlin, again two (partially) ex socialist cities, which is keeping Re:centering Periphery extensively focused on the exploration of the state directed  modernist city, before moving into market-driven embodiments of the modernist city.