Sonic work Voice of Chertanovo was presented at Bastille day in New Moscow art intervention show near Koncheevo village.

Four hidden loudspeakers were installed and broadcast conversations between the author and a collaborator, Nelly Khorsun, from time to time in the rural area that is going to be developed as part of the New Moscow area.

The sound walk was recorded at Northern Chertanovo, an experimental district, originally conceived to be the Olympic village for 1980 Moscow Games. The district was planned and engineered as a highly comfortable residential area with open plan apartments, pneumatic garbage removal, built-in furniture and heated passages, which allowed to access shops and underground parking zones without having to leave condominiums.

Unfortunately, the innovations were mostly rejected, and now it is impossible to imagine that new dormitory districts to be built here will inherit progressive ideas of that architectural masterpiece.

One-day art intervention in New Moscow

An agricultural area where the event took place is rather atmospheric, but its undefined state calls for thoughts on different semantic levels. A former merchant’s mansion that was destroyed after the 1917 revolution, a picturesque field, and a future construction site that is supposed to bring dense suburban districts are some of them.

The tradition to celebrate revolutionary anniversaries and other seminal dates has become mainstream for public art exhibition practices and cultural events from the early Soviet times.

Bastille Day in Russia has been a popular holiday for a long time, and the outline plan of the former mansion garden which looks like an old castle determined the choice of intervention name and date.

On that day, we tried to fix the temporality and uncertainty of the future of the area and capture the elusive reality which is hidden somewhere in-between the past and the present. Nobody knows how this field will look like in a couple of years.