Making Words - Moscow Poetry Club
2nd Thessaloniki Biennale
Moscow-Thessaloniki Project

[Poetry][performances][catalogue]
The Making Words - Moscow Poetry Club project  includes the works:
Common Cause  by Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina
Poets Machine by Yioula Chatzigeorgiou
Making Words Platform by Giannis Epaminondas

The project produced for the Venice Biennale (go) and the presentation in Thessaloniki is part of the Moscow - Thessaloniki project (go).

It is a collaborative project bringing together visual art and poetry, especially created for the 53rd International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, under the Artistic direction of Daniel Birnbaum.
The starting point for "Making Words" was a performance that took place in September 2008, during the annual visual arts festival Action Field Kodra in Thessaloniki. 
This was the result of a collaboration between the Moscow Poetry Club and ArtBOX with poets Vassilis Amanatidis and Evgeny Nikitin.
For the 2009 Venice Biennale , director Daniel Birnbaum invited us to further develop that initial idea. As a result, the project evolved into a collaborative platform which included two visual art works: "Common Cause" by Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina and "Poets Machine" by Yioula Chatzigeorgiou and the Making Words Platform by Giannis Epaminondas.
The project, presented at the Giardini –in the open space between the Brazilian and the Greek pavilions- were used as a stage for poets' readings during the Biennale preview (3-6 June). The Platform and the Common Cause with a documentation of the readings / performances remained in the Giardini till August 30, 2009.
In September 2008, a poetry performance took place in the frame of the annual visual arts festival “Action Field” in Thessaloniki, Greece. This project was the outcome of the collaboration between Stella Art Foundation’s Poetry Club and ArtBOX.gr. Poets Eugeny Nikitin (Russia) and Vasilis Amanatidis (Greece) presented live readings of their work within the context of a visual arts exhibition space. After the event, the recordings of the live reading performance were played back within the exhibition space for the duration of the festival. The project was received with enthusiasm by art critics and the public alike.
Daniel Birnbaum’s decision to include this project in his exhibition “Making Worlds”, in the 53rd Venice Biennale opened up new dimensions. This invitation became an opportunity to collaborate with more institutions in order to further expand upon the relationship between art and poetry. For this iteration, the Greek element was represented by poets Vassilis Amanatidis (Greece) and Daphne Nikita (Cyprus). 
Υioula Hatzigeorgiou was commissioned to create the platform hosting the poets’ actions. Designed in collaboration with architect Giannis Epaminondas, the platform serves as both container and recipient, crate for the project transportation and space for its realization. It is a site on which poets and other artists present their works and actions, as well as the medium used to store and transport the project’s props to other destinations. The work also includes a mechanism designed by the artist that transforms the poets’ voices into water surges projected onto the platform’s surfaces.
After its presentation in Venice, “Making Words” is traveling to Thessaloniki (Greece), where it is shown within the framework of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Here, a documentation of everything that happened in Venice is presented, through a new installation by Yioula Hatzigeorgiou, as well as a two days’ programme of performances and actions by poets. The poetry performances programme is curated by Vassilis Amanatidis and Daphne Nikita, always in collaboration with Moscow Poetry Club of the Stella Art Foundation.

Lydia Chatziiakovou, Christos Savvidis
co-curators of the project

2nd Thessaloniki Biennale
Port of Thessaloniki, Greece
Sept 18 - 27, 2009

Curators: Daniel Birnbaum (Artistic Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale), Evgeny Bunimovich (President of the Moscow Poetry Biennale), Evgeny Nikitin (Moscow Poetry Club), Alexander Rytov (Stella Art Foundation), Christos Savvidis (ArtBOX.gr), Lydia Chatziiakovou (ArtBOX.gr)

Organised by: Moscow Poetry Cub, Stella Art Foundation, Moscow International Poetry Biennale and ArtBOX.gr 

Directors:
Alexander Rytov, Christos Savvidis

Supported by: Stella Art Foundation (Moscow, Russia), Moscow Government, Federal Agency of Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus

Participating poets: Vassilis Amanatidis, Daphne Nikita, ???

Participating artists: Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Giannis Epaminondas, Yioula Hatzigeorgiou, .

Poets Machine Artistic Organisation: ArtBOX.gr Artistic Director: Christos Savvidis Coordination: Lydia Chatziiakovou Architectural design: Giannis Epaminondas Text: Maria Marangou Technical support: Makis Faros (audiovisuals advisor / video processing), Antonis Gatzougianis (audiovisuals advisor), Loukas Chatzis (construction), me too / communication design (visual communication)

Supporters: Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus Artventure – visual art network / Culture 2000 of the EU.
Insurance Sponsor: Karavias & associates
Transportation Sponsor: Nail 2 Nail Fine Art Movers – Texnagogi Fine Art Department by Velostrans S.A.

Common Cause III - Igor Makarevich & Elena Elagina
[Installation]

We borrowed the title of our project, The Common Cause, from the title of the main work of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov Philosophy of the Common Cause.
Fyodorov's doctrine greatly influenced Russian philosophers and writers. Suffice it to mention names like Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Solovyov.
One could say that Fyodorov's philosophy brought about the idea of the Great Utopia that predestined the course of history in the 20th century.
We are primarily interested in the peculiar ideas of the Philosophy of the Common Cause that combine mysticism and rather straightforward materialism. (Fyodorov called for resurrection of all the dead fathers and settlement of the huge number of the resurrected people using interplanetary spacecraft specifically built for this purpose).
The numerous Fyodorov's followers continued to develop his ideas and made substantial contribution into the development of the Russian rocket-building and space exploration science. In the Soviet period, however, although his followers were allowed to make drawings of rockets, the ideas that inspired them were strictly forbidden.
With our work, we wanted to reconstruct Nikolai Fyodorov's teachings in their original pure form.
His followers included people like Tsander, Koleichuk, Chizhevsky and Tsiolkovsky, whose role and contribution has yet to be properly understood.
Bread, in its meaning of the foundation of the earthly life, played an overriding role in the doctrine of the Russian cosmism.
The outer space will give us bread, Tsiolkovsky insisted.

I.Makarevich  E.Elagina

The Celestial Staircase and the Ethereal  Island 

The emergence of the Moscow conceptualist school was undoubtedly one of the most important phenomena of 20th century Russian culture. Nevertheless, its true relation to its Western counterpart remains problematic.

As the inhabitants of a certain cultural territory, we are not indifferent to the question of our own identity. Indeed, this question is one of the key stimuli for our work.

Everyone knows that Moscow conceptualism has produced a corpus of texts that is so large that its mass can be compared with the mass of a celestial body that has an orbit and a trajectory of its own. This parallel becomes even more convincing if we note that the phenomenon of Russian conceptualism is not supported by any evidence on "Earth." Taking things further, we can compare Western contemporary art with the temporal church that possesses numerous buildings; the latter are the counterparts of museums of contemporary art that resemble cathedrals in size and beauty and that exclusively house ritual objects, i.e., objects that are completely meaningless from the rational point of view. Amid the ascetic whiteness of vast spaces lie heaps of rubbish and other unimaginable things that were rejected from daily life by the satiated bourgeois society. In this way, we can oppose the terrestrial and celestial worlds and relate Russian conceptualism to cosmic phenomena that are so dear to the hearts of Russians. This brings to mind the magical figures of Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky and Malevich. Each of these giants created a fully developed system that brought together the materialist thought of the "golden" 19th century and metaphysical problems.

We have thus provisionally classified two conceptions of art as "terrestrial" and "celestial." In the practice of Siberian witch-doctors, there are many examples of the ascent to the Heavens with the help of a staircase.

Igor Makarevich

Common Cause III
 Port of Thessaloniki, Warehouse C
Thessaloniki, Greece
19 – 27.09.2009

Coordination:
Lydia Chatziiakovou
Assistant:
Tatiana Rytova (SAF)

Artists:
Igor Makarevich & Elena Elagina

Common Cause II presented in the Venice Biennial as part of the Making Words/ Moscow Poetry Club project (go)
The work was donated by the artists to the State Museums' of Contemporary Art collection