October 2011
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Past as Future:
The Burden of the Genocide Memorial
Designing a memorial or a museum to explain a genocide is no easy task. A genocide, by definition, is complex, contextualized, unfathomable, horrific in its scope. Such events resist placards, exhibit halls, memorial sculptures, public art pieces. The risk of oversimplification through memorialization has not prevented people from trying,...
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WatchThis is how the human heart works.
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The Ersatz City
While trying to remain hopeful about the future of Moscow’s urban development, it’s easy to grow disillusioned when one looks at the great follies of its past, and in particular the incredible architectural havoc wreaked by its domineering mayor, Yury Luzhkov, during his 18 year reign from 1992-2010.
Figure 1: Luzhkov, a man with terrible taste.
Mr. Luzhkov...
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Black Box in an Old Garage:
Re-visioning Abramović and Kentridge in the New Moscow
Yesterday we visited the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, a beautiful modern art space that recently opened in a renovated bus depot originally designed by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov. This kind of thoughtful reappropriation of underused communist spaces into innovative cultural spaces...
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Apple’s book failure and the Borgesian dilemma of reading the finite on an infinite screen.
Recently, I published an article in the Believer about the exciting opportunities eBooks afford writers and publishers to embrace the medium’s strengths without attempting to simply replicate the print technology of old. At the time of writing this piece, like many readers who prefer reading words on...
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WatchScene at the Spartak Moscow game. Traditionally, most Russian soccer teams were affiliated with a state-run service: Dynamo was the team of the police, CSKA was the army’s team, Locomotiv was the railroad’s team. Spartak was formed by worker’s unions to be “the people’s team,” the only team not affiliated with the state. So rooting for Spartak was a safe way to...
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