Punktum: Petersburg – Berlin

 photography, mapping
with Dmitry Vorobyev, Friederike Meese
In the framework 100 beautiful dead project.

In last few years the city of Saint Petersburg lost hundreds of historical buildings. These houses were built in 18 and 19 centuries, many of them were considered architectural monuments. Now they are pronounced obsolete and untenable and demolished to be substituted with shopping malls, hotels and business centers...

My friend, sociologist Dmitry Vorobyev and I started the “100 beautiful dead” project, which was aimed first of all to map and document the losses and secondly to trace the posthumous existence of the buildings. We tried to develop a kind of urban mythology in order to escape a dead confrontation discourse between old heritage protectors and new city developers, to invite people to an artistic reflection on the subject rather than to a flat judgement.

In the framework of the «Year of Germany in Russia 2012/13» the project was supported by Goethe-Institut and implemented together with German artists. The multidisciplinary exhibition and theater performances took place at Creative Space «Tkachi», Saint-Petersburg.

Here is a photo project which I did on short exchange trip to Berlin. The idea came from the structuralist anthropology: the structures (e.g. of social organization) can be highlighted through consecutive comparison of a similar phenomena between neighboring societies. This method was intensified to an absurdest extreme.

The project proposes a hypothesis of ‘vertical’ relation of world’s cities, which are connected on a archetypical level with each other and their common heavenly prototype.

The map of St. Petersburg is overlaid on the map of Berlin in 1:1 scale. 100 points in Petersburg, where historical buildings were once demolished, are correspondingly transferred onto the map of the German capital. Guided by the map of Petersburg the researcher visits 100 places in Berlin and marks them with a sign (a 140 cm. circle).
Each photo is signed with a corresponding St. Petersburg address and accompanied with a picture of a missing building and short reference on history and current condition. >>>