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Oh, my Wooden Rus project
Tatiana Reshetnikova-Momdzhi
Annotation
Project author: Tatiana Reshetnikova-Momdzhi
Sculptures by Grigoriy Izrailevitch were used in the project
The composition Firewoodizms in the Garden is a light greeting to Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss avant-garde sculptor.
The idea of “firewoodizms”, i.e. the use of firewood as elements of a sculptural work, struck Grigoriy Izrailevitch, an artist, when a tree fell in the garden of Bobrinskiys’ mansion, he asked that the tree not be taken away to a dump but rather sawed up and moved to his workshop. At first he used the billets as a sculpture skeleton but then he noticed their beauty and understood that they could help in expressing many ideas, in particular, the spirit of verticality, of infinity, which was brilliantly embodied in bronze by the great Giacometti.
This is a new current in art, it has a moral and ecological aspect as well, because it shows that wooden waste and parts of a diseased tree are still valuable as materials and objects of art. It is especially topical in Russia, where wood is still burnt for heating, where primeval forests cover thousands of kilometres. Russia was initially wooded, so fires were frequent and many monuments are lost.
The author associated himself with a tree. “I am an old tree where the roots have begun to rot, some branches are withered, but every year new green browses suddenly appear here and there. And leaves are rustling, scarce blooms are sloughing, seeds are maturing - and perhaps one of them will sprout when it falls on fertile ground”.