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"Theatre of Nothingness / Super-console"
"Theatre of Nothingness / Super-console"
Tallinn, Estonia
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"Theatre of Nothingness / Super-console"
Tallinn, Estonia
In September the second Tallinn Architecture Biennial (TAB) was held, this time exploring the theme of "Recycling Socialism". One of the main events was the Curators’ Exhibition which took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia (former building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia). The exhibition was hosted by the young curators of the Biennial from the Estonian association b210 (Aet Ader, Kadri Clementi, Karin Tõugu and Kaidi Õis). 12 groups of participants were chosen for the exhibition. One of these was our St. Petersburg team of chief editor of Project Baltia magazine Vladimir Frolov and architect Alexey Levchuk. Our fellow participants were Pier Vittorio Aureli (Italy), Dorthe Mardrup (Denmark), and Estonian architecture bureaux Salto, 3+1, kavakava and others. Each of the participating teams got the task to "recycle" a Soviet modernist building in Tallinn. Our team was invited to work with a cinema building called Kosmos (by architects Ilmar Laas and Udo Ivask, 1964). We called the project "Theatre of Nothingness/Super-console" and highlighted two central themes of modernism which are reflected in this structure. On the one hand, there is film as one of the most important forms of art of the 20th century, and on the other, there is the idea of the reachable Space (cosmos) as an utopia which characterizes the second half of the century.
In the "Theatre of Nothingness" viewers saw a blank screen, "zero representation" exposes the hidden message of cinema itself. And a skyscraper "Super-console" is moored to the building and which floats in the air using helium. This is the last step in the struggle of architecture with the pull of the earth which was started by the pioneers of the Soviet avant-garde. No changes were made in the building of Ivask and Laas besides the narrow structures which hold the “Super-console”.
Young Estonian arcihtect Alvin Järving wrote in cultural magazine Sirp that even though the project may seem all but reasonable at first sight, the charm of it appears when reading its description which he summarizes as such: “Frolov refers to the importance that Kosmos cinema has had in the past (time and space machine for going into a different reality), the myth of conquering space (the desire of conquering emptiness) and for these two Frolov tries to find a contemporary counterpart. The project presents the fetishism of emptiness and illusion appropriate for the contemporary setting.” Järving, however, is critical about the use and aesthetic value of this proposal.
In the "Theatre of Nothingness" viewers saw a blank screen, "zero representation" exposes the hidden message of cinema itself. And a skyscraper "Super-console" is moored to the building and which floats in the air using helium. This is the last step in the struggle of architecture with the pull of the earth which was started by the pioneers of the Soviet avant-garde. No changes were made in the building of Ivask and Laas besides the narrow structures which hold the “Super-console”.
Young Estonian arcihtect Alvin Järving wrote in cultural magazine Sirp that even though the project may seem all but reasonable at first sight, the charm of it appears when reading its description which he summarizes as such: “Frolov refers to the importance that Kosmos cinema has had in the past (time and space machine for going into a different reality), the myth of conquering space (the desire of conquering emptiness) and for these two Frolov tries to find a contemporary counterpart. The project presents the fetishism of emptiness and illusion appropriate for the contemporary setting.” Järving, however, is critical about the use and aesthetic value of this proposal.
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