Short film
Steel-City
A short dance film about public and private spaces
Modernism negates concepts of the past. It crushes traditions. It searches for new forms and ways to reflect the present, to restructure the world we know, and to cut off everything that is unnecessary and leads to simplicity and functionality.
More than a hundred years ago, Aleksey Gastev envisioned utopia in his book Express. A Siberian Phantasy, which portrayed the great cities of the future. In it, Novosibirsk is presented as a city of steel, Stal-Gorod, a high-tech and perfect urban space. The whole of Siberia could become such a space. However, only a few artefacts of this legacy remain today.
Stal-Gorod is a utopia. It is a story about space which has its own purpose. The airy public space, and closed private existence.
In the framework of The City of Tomorrow* exhibition, Goethe-Institut in Novosibirsk presents a short ballet film titled ‘Stal-Gorod’ (‘Steel-City’). Through the prism of dance, music, and cinema, the modern artists reconsider and interpret the architectural legacy of Soviet modernism.
Project partners:
- Globus Novosibirsk Academic Youth Theatre;
- State Public Scientific and Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (GPNTB);
- Siberian Agricultural Scientific Library, an affiliate of GPNTB;
- Mayakovsky Cinema and Concert Complex
*The City of Tomorrow exhibition is the result of a multi-year study of Soviet architectural modernism in post-Soviet countries. In 2019, Goethe-Institut showed the exhibition in Minsk, Yerevan, and Moscow, and now, from December till January 24, the public can visit the exhibition at the CK19 Centre of Culture.
The exhibition encapsulates a long time period of time, from 1920s constructivism to the Soviet modernism of the second half of the 20th century, and ends with the transition to the post-modernist architecture of the early 1990s. Siberian Modernism and the Novosibirsk School of Architecture are the central topics of the exhibition’s local presentation.