Xenia Vytuleva

Future Anterior Volume XII, Number 2 Winter 2015 The Atlantic Wall along the coast of Europe and Norway is in ruins. One of Hitler’s military infrastructure projects, known as Führer Directive No 40, transformed natural coastal lines into Fortress Europe. There are about fifteen hundred such Nazi bunkers. Now they lie mostly in ruins, too costly to preserve or to demolish.1 Some of the concrete bunkers have become unmoored from their foundations and are rolling onto the beaches below, slowly migrating, as if they were giant boulders, dissolving back into minerals. Since Paul Virilio’s pioneering Bunker Archeology (1975), they have become the object of countless studies and photographic surveys. 1 x Unknown (2012– ), an ongoing artistic research project by Premio New York–winner Margherita Moscardini, offers new and unusual light on the subject. First exhibited at MACRO Museum in Rome in 2012, the project seeks to rethink Bunker Archaeology and to explore the history and continued re...

“Music on bones”—as it was referred to in KGB documents and anti-propaganda movies circulated by the Soviet Government— was a dissident practice in the USSR during the Cold War from 1946 to the early 1960s.  No longer regarded as a medical document, no longer serving as a record of human physical identity, the exposed X-rays became the foundation of a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of “secret” and “precious” information. This paper reads the phenomenon of «Music on Bones» against the grain in three major respects. First, it looks at crisis as the major inspirational source, that stimulated an extreme solution to produce the object of trans-rational. Second, it considers crisis as an act of social critique and separation delineating the society into shadowy illegal dissidents and the so-called official “music patrol”. Finally, it tends to follow the logic of material culture under political pressure, where the mediums of music and photography are being taken to a whole new extreme. Laying at the intersection of politics, collective memory, secrecy, science, danger and social privilege, “Music on Bones” became a radical visual representation, a metaphor and a trope of crisis in its political, economical and ideological domains.

The Atlantic Wall along the coast of Europe and Norway is in ruins. One of the most radical Hitler’s infrastructure projects, known as Fuhrer Directive No 40, capable to transform natural coastal lines into the Fortress Europe, today lies in oblivion and solitude. Concrete structures are migrating along the borderlines, becoming part of rocks, dissolving back into minerals, metamorphosing into skeletons and the giant shells of reptiles. No longer regarded as functioning architectural bodies, no longer serving as a record of violent human activity, today fifteen hundred of these Nazi bunkers have become a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of coded information.

This paper advances the idea of transplanting the discourse of the Atlanic Wall Bunkers on the territory of photography, film and contemporary cultures at large, based on an on going cross-disciplinary research project – 1XPerUnknown. Launched in 2012, by the Italian urban artist Margherita Moscardini this multidisciplinary experiment forces us to re-think and re-calibrate the phenomenon within the broader trajectory of curatorial practices, material cultures, law, geography, conservation, chemistry and mineralogy. Balancing on the border of different media—engineering, politics, military-industrial production, statistics, science, forensic architecture the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall themselves embody numerous layers of meanings. However, it is this particular ambivalence of construction/deconstruction, a shift from of the most traumatic archeological remains - to radical art takes the discourse on the bunker as a military unit and a material fact to the whole new extreme.

Deleted from official media and cartographic reality, obliterated from national statistics, and blurred on Google Earth, enlightened however, with the flash of ideal, utopian vision, Soviet secret urban formations is one of the radical examples of Cold War’s super power games. Nameless and entirely missing from maps, secret cities formed the body of the Soviet nuclear shield and were sites of clandestine scientific and military research work.

Using recently declassified archival materials, previously unknown documents, oral histories,  Dr. Vytuleva render visible a phenomenon, that created a new topography for the Soviet social, political, urban and intellectual landscapes, and that continues to exist in contested and liminal spaces.

“Music on bones”—as it was referred to in KGB documents and anti-propaganda movies circulated by the Soviet Government— was a dissident practice in the USSR during the Cold War from 1946 to the early 1960s.  No longer regarded as a medical document, no longer serving as a record of human physical identity, the exposed X-rays became the foundation of a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of “secret” and “precious” information. This paper reads the phenomenon of «Music on Bones» against the grain in three major respects. First, it looks at crisis as the major inspirational source, that stimulated an extreme solution to produce the object of trans-rational. Second, it considers crisis as an act of social critique and separation delineating the society into shadowy illegal dissidents and the so-called official “music patrol”. Finally, it tends to follow the logic of material culture under political pressure, where the mediums of music and photography are being taken to a whole new extreme. Laying at the intersection of politics, collective memory, secrecy, science, danger and social privilege, “Music on Bones” became a radical visual representation, a metaphor and a trope of crisis in its political, economical and ideological domains.

In her paper, Vytuleva examines the origins and evolution of closed cities or ZATOs in the Soviet Union and their relationship to another type of secret Soviet space, the Gulag. She explores how the simultaneously secret and utopian aspects of these cities constituted a new and particular form of socialist urbanity, reflected in later dissident artistic practices.

No longer regarded as functioning architectural bodies, no longer serving as a record of violent human activity, today fifteen hundred of these Nazi bunkers have become a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of coded information. This paper advances the idea of transplanting the discourse of the Atlantic Wall Bunkers onto the territory of photography, film and contemporary cultures at large, based on an on-going cross-disciplinary research project – 1XPerUnknown. Launched in 2012, by the Italian urban artist Margherita Moscardini this multidisciplinary experiment forces us to re-think and re-calibrate the phenomenon within the broader trajectory of curatorial practices, material cultures, law, geography, conservation, chemistry and mineralogy. Balancing on the border of different media—engineering, politics, military-industrial production, statistics, science, forensic architecture the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall themselves embody numerous layers of meaning. However, it is this particular shift from the most traumatic archaeological remains to radical art that takes the discourse on the bunker as a material fact to a whole new extent.

Reading public art, its ability to modify and transform urban spaces, against the history of cancelled geographies and secret terrains, politically and ideologically charged architecture, modes of control and military statistics, might allow us to investigate the  new frontiers of this socio-political, anthropological and artistic phenomenon.

This Paper advances the idea of "image-acting" within the context of grey zones and contested territories, following the logic of material culture, where the mediums of publicity, arts and urbanism are being taken to the whole new extreme.

If we were to write a model of the Eastern block scientific society and its spacial representation, or perhaps wider – science at large, we would have to begin with, "In the beginning there was the secret ..."The secret has distinct priority in the individual/society equation, in fact, and is a central symbol in western cosmology and knowledge production. In case of the socialist model of knowledge production the scale of experiment was unlimited.

By close reading the urban, this paper render visible the phenomenon of secrecy and cancelled geographies. It considers secrecy as a cultural construct, with its own iconography, and in some cases iconology.

Reading the Nietzschien legacy of transcendence and transmission of pop culture, its simultaneous nature of vulgarity and re-finement, banality and subversion against the history of dissident practices, modes of control and military statistics, might allow us to investigate the new frontiers of Apolonian-Dionysian dichotomy, once articulated by the philosopher, as well as to decode the complexity of metaphors and tropes it unfolds in todays artistic discourse.

“Music on bones”—as it was referred to in KGB documents and anti-propaganda movies circulated by the Soviet Government, is perhaps the most radical example of his definition of “transcended art” and its cross disciplinary potentialities. An illegal and secret practice was the only way to distribute Western pop-music during the Cold War. The production of records on exposed X-ray films —taken from hospital trash cans and medical archives— might also serve as a direct visual metaphor of the “Pop/Tragedy” bivalent nature. The signature of this practice was not necessarily the quality of the sound that resulted from the reproduction, but the specific materiality, it was organized, though discreetly, juxtaposing several motifs and modes of reproduction—music, technology, photography, radiography, phonography, history, writing, repetition, and memory.
No longer regarded as a medical document, no longer serving as a record of human physical identity, these exposed X-rays became the foundation of a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of “secret” and “precious” information. This paper sought to discover how this particular hybrid form of transmitting information re-calls the intuition of Friedrich Nietzsche – a fatal displacement that blurred the borders of personal and impersonal, and became a means of “cognitum” and survival in the face of political and economic realities in contested and liminal spaces.

An essential strategy of this experiment is to re-think, re-calibrate, and re-activate the legacy of this intuition within the broader trajectory of contemporary visual culture, from the point of museology, curatorial practices, philosophy, law, geography, material and visual culture, anthropology, and conservation.

In 1934, architect Aleksandr Surkov oversaw the gallery installation of the U.S.S.R.’s newly founded Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic. Its primary attraction was a series of detailed dioramas dramatizing Soviet missions and exploits since the 1920s, the golden age of international polar exploration. The dioramas convey, indeed construct, a vision of the Soviet Union’s polar future; territorial, industrial, and ecological ambitions. Over the course of several years, multimedia dioramas were designed by teams of painters and scientists to fit into the museum’s new premises: the main nave of the recently desacralized church of Saint Nicholas. (A.I. Melnikov 1820-38) The essentially intact church plays an indispensible role in the dioramas themselves, both at the concrete level of their design, and by providing a physical and allegorical frame in the larger ambitions of scientific reasoning, religious belief, and the pursuit of transformative aesthetic experience in the Soviet Union c. 1937. The dioramas serve as the altar boundary, the sacral line and the direct transference from to sacral to secular knowledge. No longer regarded only as a historical document, no longer serving as a record of physical identities and geographical displacements, “Arctics and Antarctics” became the foundation of a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer information - the representation of the other territories – ideologically charged global poles.

This paper examines the dioramas in three major respects. First, it considers the dioramas in their
materiality and installation. Second, it considers dioramic representation as an act of critique and unification that delineates science, art, and belief as institutions of knowledge production. Finally, it considers how the dioramas as a hybrid, exceed the rationale underlying individual ideas in the contemporary Soviet framework. We explore the poetic concept of the zaum— Russian for beyond the mind, sometimes rendered in English a ‘trans-rational’, as a device for exploring the dioramas as a devise for “seeing through”.

The arctic is by no means a coincidental topic for these works. Comparable in some respect to Western European overseas colonies, the Soviet artic represented the fringe of cultural and governmental influence—a diverse and purportedly hostile landscape that made up a sizable area of Russia’s landmass, resources, and indignation populations. Transferred to the cosmopolitan city of St. Petersburg, representations of the arctic rest on the border of the banal—mineral extraction, shipping etc.—and the imagination of the exotic.

This paper reads the phenomenon of a dissident practice «Music on Bones» against the grain in three major respects. First, it looks at crisis as the major inspirational source, that stimulated an extreme solution to produce the object of trans- rational. Second, it considers crisis as an act of social critique and separation delineating the society into shadowy illegal dissidents and the so-called official “music patrol”. Finally, it tends to follow the logic of material culture under political pressure, where the mediums of music and photography are being taken to a whole new extreme.

Laying at the intersection of politics, collective memory, secrecy, science, danger and social privilege, “Music on Bones” became a radical visual representation, a metaphor and a trope of crisis in its political, economical and ideological domains.

In this over-determined environment of tabula non-rasa, attention to sid walks and screen memories seems to be a narrow way re-calibrate the past and the future and to expand the boundaries of contemporary architectural practice vis-a-vis the totalitarian expansion of archeology of knowledge, immediate presence and political dominances.

The topic of this paper - the aftremanth of Maleviches experiments in contemporary architectural practices and what are the possible filters and mechanism to revisit his cross-disciplinary influences.

Nameless and entirely missing from official maps, secret Soviet cities, known by their official term “ZATO,” became sites of clandestine scientific and military research work and formed one of the first ‘hyper-networks” of the Cold War ghost-urban formations. Inspired by imagined, ideal cities, based on perfect geometric plans, and articulated in the language of progressive modernist architecture, ZATOs were the technologically utopian impulse of Soviet socialism, a representation of the danger of mass destruction and the first attempt to create a new format of large-scale urban experiment: utopian and secret.

More than forty cities, some with a population of over a million, were established as a cold-war posture of confrontation and competition. Lying at the intersection of politics, architecture, collective memory, secrecy, science, danger and social privilege, this urban ghost network encompassed multiple layers of meaning, routed into the ambitions of the party to create a powerful structure of displacement. A need to re- contextualize and re-think the role of this political, ideological and artistic phenomenon has become even more urgent with the collapse of the empire and the crash of its systems of sustainability. Eventually this unique mega structure will cease to exist either as metaphor or fact. Using recently declassified archival materials, previously unknown documents, oral history, images, and interviews, the paper render visible a phenomenon, that created a new topography for the Soviet social, political, and urban landscape, and that continues to exist in present-day Russia, especially in contested and liminal spaces.

How can we de-code secret cities? What is the urban logic of secret zones? How can material cultures contribute to the apparatus of secrecy? And finally, how do we read the powerful interlocking of secrecy, space and knowledge production? Using oral histories and recently
declassified archival materials, Dr. Xenia Vytuleva renders visible the phenomenon of secret cities during the Cold War, providing a close reading in philosophy of materials, extracting architectural formulas and tropes essential for the representation of strategic knowledge.

The fascinating story of Secret Cities exposes how restrains and routine of
classified spaces reflected in the materiality of the urban grid, architectures, social modes of organization and even psychology of their residents. Questions to be discussed: What are the dilemmas the secret spaces are facing today? How secrecy is communicated to contemporary architectural and artistic practices? How can it be mapped in the previous traumas in the history of conflicts?

Lebedev launching the first Soviet computer MESM in the secular monastery Pheophania nearKiev, 1950. Nameless and missing from official maps, secret Soviet cities, became sites of clandestine scientific and military research work, forming the network of unusual secular monasteries for knowledge production. More than forty of these ghost-urban formations, some with a population of over a million, signaled an alternative path to the scientific methodology of the capitalist world. From the GOERLO plan of enlightenment and electrification of Pavel Florensky-to the development of the first Soviet computer MESM in the former monastery Theophany and the first nuclear labs, laying at the intersection of science, politics, secrecy, architecture, collective memory, danger and social privilege, these cities encompassed multiple layers of meanings. Using recently declassified archival materials, previously unknown documents, oral histories and interviews, Dr. Vytuleva render visible this phenomenon that created a new topography for the Soviet social, political, and intellectual landscapes, and that continues to exist in present-day atlas of knowledge production especially in contested and liminal spaces.

This exhibition retracing Walter Benjamin’s winter movements in Moscow in December 1926,and their contemporary spatial and political resonances.Zig- zaging on the frozen streets of the city,he is exposed to a strange and uncoded universe. These range from frost ornaments on frozen windows,to peasants shawls knitted with frozen ice flowers,and the madness of temperature scales extending beyond zero.The irresistibly cold urban landscape of Moscow becomes for Benjamin a prism that enables continuously shifting interpretations.
Today we similarly grapple with the dark melancholia of extruded airplanes, mass displacement,and the ubiquity of catastrophe and violence.The presence of these traumatic events has radically transformed our relation to safe zones,and disfigured our cities into grotesque grey zones and contested territories.

Straying mutates from an aberration to a universal, and becomes a new formula, metaphor and trope for geopolitical tensions worldwide.

This exhibition retracing Walter Benjamin's winter movements in Moscow in December 1926, and their contemporary spatial and political resonances. Zig-zaging on the frozen streets of the city, he is exposed to a strange and uncoded universe. These range from frost ornaments on frozen windows, to peasants shawls knitted with frozen ice flowers, and the madness of temperature scales extending beyond zero. The irresistibly cold urban landscape of Moscow becomes for Benjamin a prism that enables continuously shifting interpretations. Today we similarly grapple with the dark melancholia of extruded airplanes, mass displacement, and the ubiquity of catastrophe and violence. The presence of these traumatic events has radically transformed our relation to safe zones, and disfigured our cities into grotesque grey zones and contested territories. Straying mutates from an aberration to a universal, and becomes a new formula, metaphor and trope for geopolitical tensions worldwide.

The project will build upon Walter Benjamin's own experiences in Moscow in December 1926, as recorded in Moscow Diary, his personal diary. The urban landscape of Moscow becomes for Benjamin a prism that enables continuously shifting interpretations about a matrix of issues ranging from the interpersonal to the spatial and the political. Our project seeks to retrace his winter movements through an unfamiliar language, culture, community and territory. In so doing, we seek to turn Benjamin's diary into a manual, in effect, one that decodes the concept of "straying" in relation to both local and global considerations.

The etymology of the word "straying" implies a departure from one's usual or proper place. It evokes all manner of errors, discrepancies, and territories beginning as early as the 13th century, when it appears in reference to the problem of domestic animals who had wandered away from their owners. More than a casual or passive phenomenon, straying is a problem that risks penalty, forfeiture and the threat of impoundment.

From the 15th century onwards, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, straying begins to encompass not only spatial but also psychological derivations. These include individuals who have gone astray in conduct or opinion, those who are astray from the faith, friendless persons who have strayed from the social, homeless individuals who have lost a sense of home or opportunities for employment, or, importantly, those who have strayed in their allegiance to army or militia.

Our project challenges the aforementioned historical understandings, which impart a negative connotation to the act of departing from the proper or regular course. Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, we argue instead for the importance of straying as a practice and a way of life, and recognize its creative implications for originality and individuality.

Finally, we seek to situate straying within the current geopolitical arena, registering contemporary extremes such as the prevalence of grey zones, border conflicts, and contested territories. Here, straying takes on new spatial, architectural and ethical resonances. Moving beyond the individual, it implicates collective bodies and memories, and becomes strategic as it impacts the tactics of militarized nations and insurgencies. Straying thus mutates from aberration to average, and becomes a new formula, metaphor and trope for tensions worldwide.

Laying at the intersection of politics, collective memory, secrecy, science, danger, social privilege, and knowledge production, Soviet “Mail Box“ cities became a radical representation of the Space Race and Cold War Urbanism, where the idea of a classified document is being taken to a whole new extreme.

If heritage has been conceptualized as a way to stabilize crises by stabilizing meanings, how to deal with extreme experimental practices, deleted and negative histories, can- celed narratives, grey zones and shadow areas, blank historic accounts, restricted pasts and, even more insidious, censored presents?

Dr. Vytuleva is discussing challenges of exhibiting politically and ideologically charged architecture, broken narratives, contested territories and liminal spaces.

Dr. Vytuleva explores the paradox of multiple realizations of Romanticism and the " Theory of Sublime " in contemporary architecture and artistic practices. It traces the lines of recent mutation in romantic vision, as well as the radical shift in its instrumental apparatus, caused primarily by accelerating the intersection of art experiments with military advanced technologies and discoveries of the " new dangers ". Indeed, following notorious article of Barnett Neumann " The sublime is now " , published just three years after Hiroshima's tragedy, the conflict shorelines – one of the main modes of Romanticism, must extend to include the perspective of history of new conflicts, as well as new geographies, new instruments and new tools. Newman was well aware of the lessons of Kantian " sensation of the spirit " when laying claim to the modern importance of the sublime as visible-invisible and as " a desire to destroy form; where form can be formless ". Rethinking Caspar David Friedrich's " open sky's " , re-wring Turners " light sensations " , and re-calibrating Ruskin's " atmospheric exercises " , the " new sublime " is operating with collective memories of Romanticism, reexamining them in 4-D real-time physical adventures of museum installations, transplanting recently declassified investigations of the Cold War scientific experiments on the territory of critical art. Case studies to be discussed: the monumentalisation of ephemerality in Cold War exhibition pavilions, as well as the new generation of Gesamtkunstwerk in contemporary museums discourse.

Reading the legacy of Romanticism against the history of military inventions, that include advanced studies of radioactive and chemical materials, meteorological and climate data, modes of control and military statistics, psychotropic and neuroscience research, will allow us to investigate the new frontiers of this aesthetic phenomenon, as well as to decode the complexity of metaphors and tropes it operates with.

Many of the individuals and institutions that Benjamin encounters struggle to adapt and are unable to navigate the socio-political climate. In Moscow Diary, this is articulated through the linguistic construction "have been" or "has been" (бывшие люди), which gestures to a prior temporal moment that extends unchanged into the present. An individual or institution that is a "has been" is thus unable to evolve alongside historical and political developments and is thus connected only by disconnection. The lack of contemporaneity and inability to adapt becomes, for Benjamin, a defining characteristic of their identity.

Is there a revolutionary potential in becoming a "has been," or does it always have a pejorative connotation and signal being dispossessed or out of joint? How can new tactics of straying avoid conformity on the one hand, and exhaustion and obsolescence on the other?