Registration has opened for the annual MoscowUrban FEST, the largest urban festival. There are more than a hundred open educational and cultural events in the program, including walks with
different umwelt.
This year, the concept of UMWELT will be the central theme of the Festival. The notion of umwelt draws fr om the fact that each individual's experience of the city is tied to personal experience and based on the particularities of perception. The festival will show the city through various optics.
During the walks, participants will have a chance to know how the city is seen by dogs, heard by sound designers, read by graffiti artists and how the homeless make the city their home. The walks will take place on 4-5 July. The number of spots is limited, so pre-registration is required.
1. How does the city look to the people who live on the streets? "Nochlezhka", a charity organisation engaged in the rehabilitation of the homeless, is arranging tours guided by someone they helped in the past. Participants will see Moscow through the eyes of a person who once dealt with the seedy side of the city on a daily basis.
2. A walk with Maxim Kishkin, the founder of the legendary independent street art gallery NotFoundGallery, will let you see the world through the eyes of a graffiti artist and learn to read the underground codes. The history of Moscow, told with graffiti tags, will help to see the city under the prism of once elusive subculture.
3. A walk with a professional dog handler and his four-legged friend will give you a chance to see the city through the eyes of a canine. What do smells which are nearly imperceptible to us mean for dogs? How and why do they react to the sounds of passing cars which we have grown accustomed to hearing? How do dogs perceive the colours and what does the surface under their feet indicate to them?
4. A walk with Anna Egida, a graphic artist, a teacher at the British Higher School of Design, and Alexandra Scheiner, an architect and historian of architecture, will help you to take a fresh look at conventional architecture: they will tell you what comes to their mind when they look at a building, what details artists notice, what colours they search for and what forms they perceive. Participants will be offered to take a look at the oldest buildings of Moscow and the modern buildings of Zaryadye Park, to see the samples of classicism and Moscow eclecticism and to sketch urban landscapes fr om several time periods.
5. Colin Ellard, a well-known American psychologist and specialist in psychogeography, one of the star speakers of the festival and author of the book "Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life", will teach you to listen to your feelings. He is a scientist and practitioner who works at the intersection of neuroscience and architectural and environmental design. He will take two walks around Moscow. Along with Colin, participants will be invited to join a real study. The study will focus on our inner sensations evoked by different urban spaces. The event will be held in English!
6. A walk with Sergey Dmitriev will show Moscow residents both how to look at the city and listen thereto and also how to compile a sound library from the city sounds which will later help to construct a musical composition to be played at the evening concert in Zaryadye. Sergey Dmitriev is a keyboard player in the "Sad Imeni Fyodora" band, as well as in his own project named "Terpenie". He teaches at the "Nos" democratic school and "Kruzhok" educational project.
7. A hundred years ago, the city was built by male architects and male engineers who created buildings using the money of male merchants and male nobles. The participants of a "Through the eyes of a flaneur" walk will go through the historical centre of Moscow and try to see women in the urban environment: how their lives were arranged, wh ere they were allowed and wh ere not, and what it cost them to conquer new areas.