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ANNA MARTYNENKO

STONE MASONRY

(Saint Petersburg, Russia)

 

The Ivan Gaza Palace of Culture is little by little falling into disrepair. Most of its walls are surrounded by a barbed wire fence, likely because the plasterwork is crumbling off; the ribbon windows and semi-circular avant-corps ( a part of the façade projecting out from the building) with its spiral staircase are either boarded up or blocked off; the observatory dome has been missing for some time. The stonework of the front porch is also crumbling away—local authorities dutifully stack the stone fragments around the corner. The state of the building is what we would typically describe as dire.

It is seemingly obvious to everyone that the Palace of Culture (the name given to a Soviet club-house or art community center) is in need of repairs, but nobody seems to be able to identify where to start. The artist proposes her own starting point – the stonework of the building’s front porch. She chooses one of the empty niches and tries to arrange the stones to fit snugly inside, picking out stones of the correct shape. In order to do this, she measured all the currently available stones and created 3D models of them. By shuffling them around and arranging them relative to each other, the artist tries to guess the pattern of the original image. However, the outcome of this process has been subpar – large gaps are left between the stones, and they do not fit as perfectly as the surrounding materials. Was this job even worth attempting, and is it possible to restore that which has been destroyed?

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