In the history of architecture, the principle of crowding is interpreted variably: as a phenomenon of urban life and at the same time as a value representation of public consciousness - for example, a reflection of the polis system of organization in Ancient Rome - the principles of simplicity and equality, or diametrically opposed - as a form of social and architectural control, a symbol of power and inequality - in the Middle Ages.
Crowding and crowding have become a kind of driver of the development of the “circulatory system” of the city. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the functions of the housing estate literally grew on the urban fabric - a format of social housing appeared, in which crowding provoked the involvement of a person in life outside the home.
Maxim Ima's project is built on several levels of perception, where an excursion into the history of architecture plays an important role. Natively, through personal experience, the artist dissects the process of environmental influence on a person in layers.
It is based on the author's development as a person and an artist surrounded by a “stone”, “cramped” city. The feeling of crowding, congestion, formed by urban development. From communal apartments - the legacy of Imperial St. Petersburg - to the “panel frequencies" of the outskirts. The starting point of the desire for change through working with the surface of the city. Desires are socially approved, but practice is not.
From personal to professional - at this level, the artist interacts with the surrounding space, changing it through his own artistic practice. Street art is human-centered, it is alive, as is the space of the city with which it enters into dialogue. Ima is “building” her city of the future (is it the future?) in the white gallery cube, he tries to pack the outside into a cube, fill it to the brim. It is symbolic that by the time the project was born, the subject of the image was transformed in the artist's practice - from a planar image, lettering, where the surface of the city is the basis, to floral motifs that grow out of the urban layer, to images that form a certain structure on their own. “Protection of a development project” cynically flirts with form, images - graphic works (the work is torn from the urban plane / fabric, independently) - literally begin to form a structure, expanding into volume. The cultural phenomenon of “Metropolis", where is the demiurge artist?
The history of architecture is a series of questions about a better world, where the “best" is as far away as possible from the benefactor, a resident of a megalopolis. The real-time project becomes a laboratory of social experiment, where the viewer, as the very potential beneficiary, makes his own choice - to place himself in an overcrowded space or go beyond it. A metaphor for a city of the future: a human-centered, comfortable one, where the infrastructure develops around the main character, a human being, or a closed, cramped contour in which a person will be forced to find new scenarios of life.
Unlike the 70s with the principles of improved housing and a certain vivid but short-term non-verbal call “from crowding to freedom” in the architectural plane, the modern metropolis “shrinks”, but not in terms of its own presence, but in terms of that so valuable space for its inhabitant - the modern inhabitant of the metropolis - the square footage of his own housing.
People “escape" from residential complexes to public spaces, relying on public architecture. The beautiful packaging with the theses “the priority of free time” or “the burden of ownership" sets the vector of crowding formation: the architectural manifestation of life becomes more complicated (more functions require more forms - from the pool to the fitness center), being squeezed into an economic vice - the more complex the typology of forms, the smaller they are!
At this moment, hundreds of pairs of “eyes of the well-wishers of the metropolis” of Maxim Ima's future development project are looking at the viewer.
Curator: Maria Turkina
Project coordinator: Galina Leontieva
Architecture: Ksenia Bruk, Alina Borodina
Technical Director: Alexey Feskov
Strategic Partner: Roshchino Residence
