MAXIM DIDENKO + AJ WEISSBARD

 

Music and sound design: Alexandr Karpov
Camera: Igor Tsvetkov, Boris Kostomarov, Ilya Starilov
Editing: Igor Tsvetkov
Colour correction: Diana Vishnevskaia
Performers: Petr Didenko, Nikita Didenko, Richard Regush, Yakov Vasenin, Aglaya Lyubtsova
Producer: Ekaterina Didenko

 

In co-production with Kunstfest Weimar 2019, as part of the programme Hitze Kälte Apparate (Heat Cold Devices), funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Site-specific video installation
25 August – 8 September 2019

 

In 2019, the centenary year of the Bauhaus, Kunstfest Weimar invited Maxim Didenko back to Weimar, two years after Chapaev and Pustota. This time he worked with the American artist AJ Weissbard, whose installations of light and space span theatre, opera, architecture and exhibitions. Their joint piece, The Children of Bauhaus, was made for Hitze Kälte Apparate (Heat Cold Devices), the festival’s programme on the Bauhaus and the idea of nature.

 

The installation holds up two defining sides of Weimar: birth and death. The Bauhaus was born here, and a few kilometres away, on the Ettersberg hill, stands Buchenwald. On one screen the camera moves through the grounds of the former concentration camp as they are today: the gate, the fences, the grass in the wind, empty of people. On the facing screen, children play in a forest: building, dressing up, playing at war and at school, inventing their own rules. The two films answer each other across the room, held together by Alexandr Karpov’s score of drones, field recordings and children’s voices.

 

The work was shown in the boardroom of Weimar’s former Notenbank, a room with a dark history of its own: in the Nazi years it was used for party meetings. Visitors entered in groups of up to twenty and found a long table laid with paper and sharpened pencils. Nobody told them what to do. During the 18-minute film they could simply watch, or write and sketch their response; when the film ended in silence, their notes were collected into a daily archive.

 

“Does creation represent the beginning of a concept or the end of an idea? Should limits be placed on our imagination? How can we enshrine memory as we construct the future?”