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The derelict space of the GES-2 powerstation in Moscow will play host to a series of installations and performances over the next seven days (20-27 February)

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A pre-soviet powerstation that’s about to turned into a major new arts destination for Moscow by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, is going out with an artistic bang before building begins.

The GES-2 powerstation, which long-powered the Russian capital, is being transformed by the V-A-C Foundation, which champions contemporary Russian art and artists and will provide some 5,000 sq m of new gallery space.

But this week, the derelict space is playing host to the V-A-C’s Geometry of Now event — a series of truly cutting-edge installations reclaiming the raw structures within GES-2, an interdisciplinary lecture and workshop programme developed around topics in sound art studies and performances that reconfigure its architectural space.

The GES-2 powerstation in Moscow, which is being transformed by the V-A-C Foundation. Image: Ivan Erofeev

Over seven days (20-27 February) installations and performances that carry on into the dawn, will bring the empty space alive and all curated by musician and artist Mark Fell: ‘For me the most interesting aspect of the space, an imposingly beautiful pre-Soviet power station, is its temporal physiognomy: a site of discontinuity between deconstruction and reconstruction. The building as active process, as opposed to passive object, challenges our basic assumptions about it being a mere container of ‘space’, as a hypothetically inert primitive lacuna or pause. These are sonically redrawn as intersections between an indefinite number of dynamic contexts; the place where possible histories and futures interrogate one another in a play of reciprocal disturbance.’

Inside Renzo Piano Building Workshop's plan for the power station 

On his own website (www.markfell.com), you’re welcomed with a far more direct and perhaps slightly more accessible quote from Fell, in answer to a questionnaire that states: ‘[today]… I learnt loads about not giving a fuck about what other people are doing.’

RPBW's visualisation of what the powerstation will look like in 2019

Luckily Blueprint does care what others are up to and will be at the event reporting back in issue 352, about the event and what RPBW has planned for the building which is due to open in 2019.

Main image: Gleb Leonov