RT Photo / Diana El-Bakri
Abracadabra experimental art festival hit Moscow
Published 26 April, 2009, 20:41
An interactive trip into experimental forms of art reverberates through the old wine warehouses at Moscow’s Winzavod Art Centre. This is the Abracadabra art festival, this year entitled ‘Evolution- New possibilities.’
Thousands flocked to Winzavod on Saturday to learn more about experimental music and other mediums of art. The Abracadabra art festival was held for the third time after a two year break. It is mostly devoted to music, considered the only universal pre-language form of dialogue possessing a magical priority to unite people. However, all other forms of art have also found their place at the festival.
The basic idea of the project, which began in 2004, was to set and show a creative laboratory of art. The terms for the participants – people of different generations and art mediums including musicians, architects, artists, poets, actors, directors, choreographers and others, required them to unite into certain artistic groups and then, in three weeks, create and present their works.
Experimental music
The musical part of the festival is traditionally the heaviest. Here one can hear all genres, including those really new. For example, there are both the originators of electronic music on the Russian scene as well as its new participants.
 RT Photo / Diana El-Bakri |
Katya Andreas is a young singer who has a different approach to music. Moreover, she sings in her own language, which she calls “pure sound.” She prefers singing in forests, underground parking or other places she likes which have “good energy and acoustics.”
The other participant is 'Volga' collective, which became popular in Moscow in the beginning of the 2000s. Their music is a combination of electronics, elements of ancient Russian folklore and ritual motives of the music of the world. Musicians use Old Russian texts of the 11th through 19th centuries as the texts for their songs.
One of the most influential Russian collectives in hip-hop music and extreme sports – the Flammable Beats, uniting popular DJs, presented an unusual new scratch program.
The cinema-video experience
 RT Photo / Diana El-Bakri |
Another significant medium represented at Abracadabra is video art. One of the projects is a presentation of a video magazine created by students at the Photography and Multimedia school of Rodchenko. Under the direction of video art artist Kirill Preobrazhensky, the magazine “Vidiot” was developed and will be distributed not less than twice a year in DVD format.
Preobrazhensky himself has presented his video presentation “Kursk. The emersion.”
The festival also hosted the premiere of the first Soviet Internet TV, USSR-TV, which is to be launched shortly. The documentary shown as part of the project told the story of “Mausoleum-The great tomb,” along with other movies and video clips.
Performances and installations
In the field of experimental performance works from students of the school-studio of Mkhat, Moscow Academic Art Theatre, Kirill Serebrennikov’s course were the works of choreographer Dina Khussien, Lena Shtyk, and many others.
The former wine storehouses were decorated with architectural 3D projections which were guiding visitors and directing them through the venue. Those were created by ArcHelp (Evgeny Afonin, Dmitry Sokolovsky, and Alexey Zolotarevich).
Saturday’s show at Winzavod was the first of five events planned for the festival. Its program will continue with four more similarly scaled events being an impressive number of musical and other performances, master classes with people of art, shows and much more.
The next session of the festival will begin on May 16, opening a number of new creative labs and continuing to acquaint people with latest art update.
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