Vjera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream

Vjera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream is a site-specific intervention into the display apparatus developed by the Bauhaus Dessau to narrate the history and the ideas of the Bauhaus via images and texts. Using the pre-given apparatus as well as archives of historical documents / photographs of Bauhaus Dessau, by a way of textual re-framing, another (fictional) narrative has been established. The text is a digital collage of textual fragments of the chapter “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream” from the novel What Is To Be Done? (opens in a new tab) by Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (opens in a new tab) (1863).

In her dream Vera Pavlovna imagines a society where social relations and scientific progress find their expression in crystal palaces that are spread around the world bringing about a “radiant and beautiful” future. A variety of utopian, ideological and architectural nodes can be mentally remapped via this intervention; from Paul Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture, Bruno Taut’s Glass House to Domestic Revolution’s kitchen-less houses and communal housing ideas.

Details

technical info: intervention, interactive, photo-archive / dimensions: variable / year 2015
exhibition view: Cracks in the Curtain Wall – Beyond an Architecture of Cleanliness (opens in a new tab), Bauhaus, Dessau