Kraftzellen | Syntopia

Syntopy Place is a permanently acting outpost of syntopia in Cologne. This is a Russian-Udmurt peasant hut, assembled and erected as a satellite of the Simultanhalle, the former modular building of the Ludwig Museum. Originally, this was the space for the implementation of the second stage of the Sapiens humanecological project. Although contrasting in all possible parameters, both buildings represented an integrated, spatial drama, in which fascinating subjects of the most diverse forms – ranging from social to historical cultural – were acted out. Today, the hut exists separately, yet its creative potential gradually grows. It was originally founded as a type of building concentrating ethno-cultural memory. Sacharow-Ross attempted to retain every single grain of this memory. The assembling and installation of a Russian house in Germany by carpenters and volunteers – all these procedures were, for him, filled with profound symbolical meaning.
A house without windows becomes a zone of extreme concentration. The visitor senses the vast scale and self-sufficiency of the peasant cosmos; the meaningfulness and the symbolism of each gesture and movement implemented in it. At the same time, there is a need for navigation in this cosmos. This need was once expressed by an urban dweller who embarked on a tour of the Russian villages: “In these remarkable peasant huts, I encountered, for the first time, the miracle that consequently became one of the elements of my works. I learnt not to look at the picture from aside, but to revolve in the picture myself, to live in it.” These words were written by Wassily Kandinsky.
Syntopy Place is a space where students, children and viewers “learn to revolve and live.” Inside the wooden walls, artists hold multimedia projects. The timber nevertheless retains memories of the warmth and simplicity of communication. Joseph Beuys probably experienced something similar when creating his wooden postcard. Two dimensions were “normal,” corresponding to the needs of the postal department. The third dimension – breadth – turned the postcard into a wooden beam, concentrating the warmth of preliterate culture. One critic correctly noted about Sacharow-Ross’ project: “The highly complicated social and cultural organization of a megalopolis of many facets necessarily entails tribal substructures.”