Alexander Bikbov / Александр Бикбов

Speed, long distances, new places vanish from the lockdown life rhythm.

Inventive cooperation fills in its relative scarcity with new and sometimes unexpected ways. In some closed yards musicians give evening concerts from the windows of their flats, in some neighbourhoods even house numbers compete with the odds in self-made quiz, some people just discuss from one balcony to another.

Meanwhile large urban spaces remain generally empty and silent, especially when they lack the «essential» commerce around, as daytime shots testimony showing deserted spaces in the heart of the city.

A way to augment this silence and emptiness, without necessarily breaking it, is to add your light forms to the preinstalled and stray ones. Using old slides from the previous decades and from unforeseen sources, such as old Soviet photos projected on the walls of «bourgeois» European cities, you get an especially suggestive trip.

I already experimented with Soviet propaganda slides on street walls in Rome, when I discovered that the origin of some of them did not at all conform the expected ideological origin. A whole detective story, the one for a passionate historian, is sketched in my post written in Russian. If you don’t speak Russian, you may tempt an online translator.

Even without the same biographical and political background that an ex-Soviet ex-teenager may revive making this semi-illegitimate mixture of forms and sources, some unpredictable visual rhymes may come up from an arbitrary assembled set of slides and photo-impressions.

Those coming from different periods, countries and destinations.

Those resounding or contrasting with empty outer spaces.

Making you dream with the shapes of ancient industrial design.

Making you think of the world of communications that is changing.

Making you just absorb colours and shapes.

Or experience some grotesque feelings accompanied with inscriptions full of school wisdom.

Depending on the emulsion of the old film, some images keep colours while some get red or pale letting you imagine they are even older.

Reddish cast draws even closer French and Soviet didactic shapes of the same era.

While some of them look retrospectively pretty modern.

The images that don’t move get back their magic in the slower and more contemplative time flow.

In the same moment as the city struggling the epidemic whips up the time, unexpectedly reusing for public purpose the most impudent spots of visual capitalism.

One of the manifest rhythmic measures of the day, aside the bells of always-active churches, is an applause session at every 8 p.m. destined to doctors. It does not exhaust with the days passed.

In the rest of the day a kind of chill-out sound and visual environment is settled. Even ambulance horns are very rare, as there are no more traffic jams.

Grey concrete promises the coming summer.

Old light technology unwraps twinkling imagination.

All is needed for that is to find a home slide projector with a box of old film and to wait until the dark.

To remix Paris and Moscow, socialist promises and bourgeois didactic.

This is a pleasure destined to be shared without insistence, sometimes passing aleatory unnoticed or suddenly exclaimed by an accidental spectator.

A pleasure joining futurist retrospection, brought by design of the first magic lanterns.

Click on the images to see them in a larger size and in a gallery mode.

Метки: COVID-19, public order, urban, город, нетрансцендентальная эстетика, открытка, социология пространства, столичный прием