"Station 1" / sculpture

Part 1

The history of the cube began as a continuation of the FGE (Fiction Gallery Expedition) route. After the destruction of the brick “Stop” in 2000, I and Vova Zaichenko decided to do something more durable and vandal resistant. I recalled an observation from childhood, when in the 80s near our house a dump truck dumped the floor of the cement body and it froze, possibly for centuries. This cement slide attracted children to play "king of the hill" - to climb and throw off each other (such a teenage courage) or just climb up and stand, portraying and feeling like a champion.

So the idea of a meter cube came to me. But just a cube in itself, a regular polyhedron - it is not interesting. The place played an important role. Since we started moving outside the institution, outside of any competitive foundations and curatorial frameworks, we chose hills as an appropriate place for open interaction with the environment, destroying the restrictions in the form of room walls. And so that we in the workshop on Mount Schekavitsa would have the opportunity to observe the panorama around the cube, we decided to build this art object opposite - on Mount Zamkova.

First we built a mirror cube. It was a physical "Station - 1", to which not a single path led. And in the virtual space I created the site “Station - 2” for storing photo-video fixations. In the uncontrolled zone, the mirror reflection of the cube began to annoy visitors, and less than a week later the cultural balance was determined - the cube in a disfigured state, strewn with fragments of mirrors, withstood the first battle with the crowd.

This kind of experimental activity provided food for thought and designing our own self-sufficient concept of FGE. For art purity, unlike legal galleries with physical addresses, the need for a market strategy and the intervention of intermediaries working within institutions has disappeared. The intersecting creative impulses turned out to be important for us, and not the competition of like-minded people, whose goal is to get on the pages of glossy magazines. From this followed conclusions and the search for further communication with the urban environment.

To be continued ... >>>

Konovalov I