Anton Svetlichny.
Forms of Tenderness
This place where machines are at rest has been turned into a space of mechanical sleep by Anton Svetlichny—an “espace du sommeil, ” to borrow the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos’s expression.
As a rule, people tend not to linger in the House of Culture’s underground parking lot. The coldness of this space asks to be softened, its emptiness to be filled with comfort, with life (be it virtual one), with visitors (be they imaginary), to be made more supple and more unpredictable. At present, it is predominantly populated by cars, and they turn out to be the primary public of Forms of Tenderness.
Image by Ruslan Shavaleev
For me,GES-2 is a utopia of conflictless existence, where one always finds a place for creativity, joy, tranquility. The space—permeated with light, full of air—allows for unhindered movement, playful possibilities, a diversity of routes. Things are different in the parking lot. When people find themselves here, they are, strictly speaking, already in the building, but in fact theys have yet to enter the “real House of Culture.” This observation gave rise to one of the tasks of this installation—to draw the Parking into the general mode of feeling atGES-2 , select an audio analogue for it in order to achieve a similar emotional effect.
Installation consists of a series of tracks recorded with the participation of live musicians on acoustic and electronic instruments. Though they are stylistically diverse—jazz, pop, electronic music, minimalism, ambient—each track is alike in working with images of tenderness, softness, lyricism, stasis, and rest. Then, the computer sets in—a real-time algorithm composes an endless and endlessly changing lullaby from the recordings, as it were lulling the void, just as the chorus of nannies in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta lulls the opera’s blind protagonist.
Anton Svetlichny (Rostov-on-Don, 1982) is a composer and pianist. He is a graduate of the Rostov State Rachmaninov Conservatory’s composing faculty and a winner of the Pythian Games composing competition. He is a member of the “Resistance material” group of composers, and a co-founder of the contemporary music ensemble InEnsemble.
Performers
Elizaveta Boytsanova, flute
Anastasiya Kamenskaya, keyboards
Maria Kovalyova, voice
Sofia Kushnir, oboe
Tatiana Lukina, violin
Omar Saidov, drums
Ariy Samoylenko, saxophone
Anton Svetlichny, keyboards
Anna Serdyukova, guitar
Alexandra Serikova, voice
Ivan Sobolev, flute
Alexander Soldatenko, guitar
Kirill Tatyanko, guitar
Filipp Teratsuyan, bass guitar
Ilya Fokin, electronics
Alisa Shestunova, keyboards
Audio-engineer: Andrey Titov Vroublevsky