June 8, 2008
Yekaterinburg, Russia
A one-day photo marathon through Yekaterinburg.
Each participant chose one colour and photographed it while following a shared route through the city. The participants walked together, but each followed their own colour.
The photographs were later collected and organised according to colour.
Participants: Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Vladimir Romanov, Dmitry Razhev, Marina Razheva.
Captured trophies:
Black / White
Red
Green
Yellow
Blue
A Virtual and Contemplative Instrument for Listening to the City
PanGorMonium: Yekaterinburg is a work conceived as a virtual instrument for experiencing the city through attentive presence, memory, and inner listening.
The work was first presented on 12 September 2008 at Gallery ParaRam, Yekaterinburg, as part of the international group exhibition Enstruments, within the Finnish–Russian festival Together: Ecology of Space.
Physical work: photography, toned paper, collage
Dimensions: 1682 × 1188 mm
PanGorMonium does not produce sound in the conventional sense.
Its body is the city itself.
Architecture, infrastructure, memories, absences, everyday details, forgotten traces, and personal associations become elements of an invisible instrument.
Each person assembles this instrument differently.
For one, it may be a railway station, a bridge, a factory, or a monument. For another, a courtyard, a staircase, an old tree, a demolished house remembered from childhood, or the rhythm of a familiar walk.
The instrument has no fixed form. It exists in the attentive encounter between a person and a place.
PanGorMonium is played not by action, but by attunement.
Listening becomes a creative act. Perception becomes performance.
The participant is both listener and performer, while the city becomes both instrument and score.
There is no external audience.
The experience unfolds inwardly, where individual acts of listening may sometimes resonate with one another — in harmony or dissonance — forming a temporary and invisible orchestra.
The work is not about hearing the city as sound.
It is about sensing what the city can make audible within us.
PanGorMonium can unfold through different layers of urban experience. They are not fixed categories, but overlapping fields through which a city may begin to resonate.
Cultural
Architecture, monuments, public spaces, rituals, symbols, and collective memory.
Industrial
Factories, transport systems, infrastructure, construction, technical structures, and the material processes that shape the city.
Everyday
Courtyards, passages, walls, vegetation, handwritten signs, routines, sounds, and details that usually remain unnoticed.
Absent
Demolished buildings, erased landscapes, vanished places, forgotten names, and things that survive only through memory.
These layers can overlap, contradict one another, or remain barely perceptible. Their combination is different for every listener.
PanGorMonium is an artist-constructed word that intentionally resists a single definition.
Its associations include Pan, suggesting wholeness; hormao, evoking movement and activation; harmony, suggesting resonance; and monos, pointing toward the singularity of individual perception.
These meanings do not form a strict etymology. They coexist as resonances within the title, reflecting the layered and polyphonic nature of the city.
PanGorMonium: Yekaterinburg became the starting point for Anatomy of Cities, an ongoing R² research into urban environments through attention, memory, movement, colour, and listening.
Each new city can become a different instrument, shaped by its own material history, rhythms, absences, and emotional geography.
PanGorMonium: Budapest is currently developing as a new study within this ongoing research. it.
2006
Format: public performance, happening, video documentation (44 minutes)
Location: Russia, Yekaterinburg city center and metro stations
Partners: State Center for Contemporary Art (GCCSA), ParaRam gallery
Wedding of the Tower and the Metro is a multi-day public performance reimagining key landmarks of Yekaterinburg through the lens of local Ural traditions. The project creates a new living mythology for the city by symbolically uniting two urban giants — the Tower (he), an unfinished TV tower and prominent telecommunications structure, and the Metro (she), the city’s underground transit system.
The project unfolds as a ritual action reflecting deep archetypes and urban legends, expressing both the hopes and fears of the city’s residents. Through ceremonial acts and symbolic gestures, the performance seeks to harmonize unseen forces within the city and prevent potential catastrophe.
The Tower and the Metro represent vast, intangible City Giants—beings with immense, mysterious bodies resting beneath the urban layers. Though currently still, their forces pull toward each other. Should they awaken suddenly or clash, disaster such as an earthquake could follow.
The myth is not just a story but includes ritual actions designed to control these forces and protect the city.
The Giants’ longing for union has reached a peak — the time has come to hold their Wedding.
If this ritual is not performed, the Giants may pass each other by, and the symbolic “Child” — the city’s future potential — will never be born. Alternatively, a chaotic union could bring disaster.
This myth draws from ancient, pre-Ellin traditions and familiar motifs of Titans and Titanesses. The Tower and Metro stand as symbolic Titans within the city landscape.
The myth partly explains the origins and roles of these urban forms and partly prescribes complex ritual actions that help channel and contain hidden powers, ensuring the city’s well-being.
On August 25–26, 2006, Yekaterinburg witnessed a collective celebration of the Wedding of the Tower and the Metro.
This ritual involved local artists, residents, and guests, bringing the myth to life through a series of staged actions:
Public announcement of the upcoming Wedding (2006, August 18).
The solemn Wedding ceremony — a modern ritual binding the Giants (2006, August 25).
A communal feast — an ancient ritual that unites participants and seals the ceremony’s success (2006 August 25).
The Fertilization rite — participants crafted miniature Tower figures symbolizing the Tower’s “seed” (2006 August 26).
And discreetly placed them throughout metro stations and trains (2006 August 26).
The action transcended artistic mystification, becoming a real and effective ritual. Just days after the event, news came that the long-frozen metro construction would resume.
September 2006 — International Festival Stop! Who’s Coming?, Moscow, special project of the Yekaterinburg branch of the State Center for Contemporary Art (GCCSA) StolpoTvorenie.
November 2006 — Video screening at the ParaRam art salon, Yekaterinburg.
2007 — As part of the StolpoTvorenie special project (Yekaterinburg GCCSA), nominated for the Innovation All-Russian competition award in the category Regional Contemporary Art Project.
2023 — Documentation of the project participated in the archival exhibition “Art without a ticket: the history of public art in Yekaterinburg” at the Ural Branch of the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
August 19, 2006
Format: public performance, happening, video documentation (6:41)
Location: Russia, Yekaterinburg
Partners: State Center for Contemporary Art (GCCSA), Yekaterinburg bread factory Vseslav
The art project “The Möbius Pretzel” is part of a multi-stage process of creating an urban mythology.
It transfers a conceptual idea into public space, transforming the artistic act into a communal ritual. The mythologeme appears as an edible Möbius strip, and its consumption becomes a form of communion — a symbolic sharing of the city’s “body.”
The format of the project embodies a symbiosis of artistic performance, PR action, urban myth, and public ritual.
A record-breaking pretzel, made from a four-layer sponge ribbon (with a circumference of 4.5 meters, a height of 20 cm, and a weight of 52 kg), was generously baked by the Yekaterinburg bread factory Vseslav.
Ingredients used: Flour – 11 kg, Sugar – 8.7 kg, Eggs – 11 kg, Vegetable oil – 0.6 kg, Apricot confiture – 16 kg, Sugar syrup (for soaking) – 7.3 kg
Biscuit mass: 26 kg Exact dimensions: 1.5 × 2 meters Total weight: 52 kg
Length of the sponge ribbon: 4.5 meters
From the author:
A city is a multitude of layers — coexisting within a single whole, yet often not only disconnected, but unaware of each other’s existence.
A simplified model of the city might be imagined as a pretzel made from a multi-layered sponge ribbon, twisted into a Möbius strip — a kind of “pretzelization” of a mathematical ideal.
The Möbius strip possesses some curious properties: it has only one continuous surface, no “other” side, no inside or outside, and any object moving along it is gradually turned 180 degrees. In other words — it flips things upside down.
This leads one to think that perhaps our existence has no “reverse.” Everything — hellish abysses, heavenly gardens, mysterious depths of the spirit, and other dimensions — is already here, now, with us, on this side. That is to say: thisworldly.
To “absorb” the city, one must thoroughly chew the pretzel. This can be done extensively — gnawing on a single layer, or intensively — by biting through all the layers at once. Though in this case, of course, only within the limits of one fragment.
2004, Yekaterinburg
In 2004, R² developed the photo-marathon format through their first Color Hunting actions.
The participants spent entire days walking through Yekaterinburg and photographing a chosen colour and its shades. The photographs were later sorted into folders according to colour.
White
Black
Red
Green
Yellow
Blue
