Photo project «Scuffolded city»
The Photo Project is a study on the transformation of St. Petersburg’s urban environment, launched in 2002. During the restoration work on St. Petersburg’s architecture, the urban environment is being transformed into a classic and Baroque Petersburg with a clear voice of young and arrogant design. All of the most significant manifestations of the Petersburg historical architecture have passed through a period of facade cloaking behind archaic wooden construction scuffoldings. The design of the scuffoldings has the true beauty of a functional object.
«City in forests». It’s a piece of exposure. A creative space called «Tkachi». St. Petersburg.
The big one can be seen at a distance, and if you think about moving away from the city to the height of a bird’s flight, the construction scuffoldings would look like a massive artistic and architectural action. For the time being, they hid the beauty of the XVIII and XIX centuries, firing on the manifesto of the new architecture. Many of these images have already become historical evidence of the transformation of the urban environment in the early twenty first century.
The facade of the Admiralty building.
The Admiralty Building.
Facade of the building of the Russian ethnography museum.
The building of the former German Embassy on Isaac Square.
Alexander Borovsky (head of the Department of the Newest Currents of the Russian Museum): «Kharshak has been picturing a city in the scuffoldings since 2002. Scuffoldings are a sign of a normal desire to somehow reformulate the urban text towards streamlining or, as we often do, adorning. In the meantime, all these scuffoldings and structures, combined with the original stable cultural messages, which provide a great architecture, are also textual and interesting. For Christo, this text is a sign of self — approval, and Kharshak is more of an environmental artist: he listens, observes, tries to save something disappearing, representing something that is lost in the heat of large recodes. Niche is so rare that I’m sure Kharshaks work will be hunted, as he now hunts the rarities of the visual environment.
The project, launched in 2002 on the eve of St. Petersburg’s three hundredth anniversary, now has about a hundred stories. The project is continuing, as is the restoration work in the historic centre of the city.
