Associative Row
Armchair Collection
Armchairs design: Pravda Bureau, Lana Simonian
Cgi: Lana Simonian
Pravda Bureau asks the questions "who we are," "what are we about?
We work through associative visions of our shared past, which often did not exist in reality.
In another architectural project, we once again searched for the identity of a place, resorting both to a dry analysis of the history of the place and to our own romantic associations. We imagined the object of a modern interior "flowing out" of its surroundings, acquiring its properties, and we began to experiment with the application of the environment to different objects. This is how the "Association Row of Armchairs" came about - deliberately simplified volumes reduced to the most basic form, so as not to take away from the past applied to them.
Armchair M
Mosaics were an important means of communication in Soviet times. They told of the dreams and aspirations of Soviet inhabitants: of flights into space and scientific discoveries, of the successes of steelworkers and agronomists, of the different peoples who were part of this grand territorial entity, and finally of the lives of ordinary people building a "communist paradise" on earth. Mosaics were both an expression of faith and a means of propaganda - it is important to remember both.
Today, we collect the disparate fragments of the past and give them a place in the present. We make them part of the modern world, using them in interiors and on pieces of furniture to serve as reminders, to give rise to thoughts and associations - everyone's own. The main thing is that the memory of the era does not disappear.
Like every mosaic we find, every chair is unique. It can be a piece of history from a forgotten pioneer camp, resort boarding house or factory.
Armchair B.
Bas-reliefs and high reliefs were another way to tell the achievements and aspirations of the Soviet people. Typically made of sheet metal or concrete, they look very massive. This apparent heaviness and monumentality is mesmerizing and very serious.
The saddest thing about this story is that most of the artists of these compositions remain unknown to us. And we would like to achieve with our project two things: the first is to convey the spirit and mood of that time; the second is to change the attitude to the importance of copyright. That is why to create the armchairs we invite contemporary artists who create a series of stories with us. One unique armchair - one unique composition.
Armchair D.
From the memoirs of an architect of the Pravda Bureau: "I am six years old. I am lying in bed at my grandparents' cottage (dacha) in the suburbs of Moscow. In front of me is a picture made of wood, showing three men with strange, distorted emotions on their faces. Later I learned that it was a reproduction of a painting of "Hunters in the Hunt" by the artist Vasily Perov, made in the technique of marquetry.
Marquetry is an artistic technique with a French name and a Dutch origin. It is a kind of mosaic of veneer, which was very popular in Soviet times. It was widely used in the manufacture of paintings, caskets, pieces of furniture.
In general, the most various subjects were depicted on marquetry: birches on the forest edge, ships against the background of some city, fairy-tale heroes, compositions of flowers and abstract figures. But since we strongly associate marquetry with childhood, we draw the stories for the chairs from our childhood. The presented object is a frame from a Soviet animated film from 1964 directed by Boris Dezhkin, "'Shaibu! Shaibu!"
Armchair Sten(k)a.
Carpets on the walls of my grandmother's apartment are another memory from our childhood. What were they for? For "beauty," of course. But they were also hung to protect themselves from the noise of the neighbors, and at the same time to preserve the privacy of their own conversations. That's why the carpet was the best friend of Khrushchev's thin walls and communal rooms with poor sound insulation.
In the 1990s and 2010s, carpets, along with shelf-walls (stenka), became the objects of many jokes and a sign of bad taste. But in 2022, we wonder: were these functional interior objects really that bad? We conveyed that reflection in our chair design. We made it out of red lacquered wood veneer, which has always been used to make "walls," and... a carpet.
Realization
For the joint exhibition of Sample Gallery and MMOMA Museum "Environment" we made a mosaic chair. It was important for us to find a ready-made mosaic with a story, not to assemble a new mosaic with a Soviet plot. Yes, it would have been much easier and cheaper, but we would have lost the most valuable thing: the imprint of a bygone era. It leaves artifacts, it keeps the best of a bygone era - the love of labor, the aesthetics of everyday life.
This mosaic consists of materials which are typical for Soviet mosaics of the turn of 60-70s: thin and rather fragile glazed ceramic tiles (2 - 3 mm thick), and transparent glass tiles, also 2 - 3 mm thick, painted on the inside. When cladding the chair, part of the mosaic was left on the original base, partly transferred by means of a film method. The pattern was assembled in such a way that it would look compositional on each side of the chair separately, as well as on the chair as a whole, flowing into each other.
This mosaic consists of materials which are typical for Soviet mosaics of the turn of 60-70s: thin and rather fragile glazed ceramic tiles (2 - 3 mm thick), and transparent glass tiles, also 2 - 3 mm thick, painted on the inside. When cladding the chair, part of the mosaic was left on the original base, partly transferred by means of a film method. The pattern was assembled in such a way that it would look compositional on each side of the chair separately, as well as on the chair as a whole, flowing into each other.
Thank you for watching!
2021
