O sonho de Tatlin e o futuro perdido/en

O sonho de tatlin e o futuro perdido

Guilherme Peters

In 1919, the constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin presented a project to build a large monument in St. Petersburg, Russia, on the occasion of the 3rd International. The monument consisted of a large spiral-shaped iron structure, approximately 600 meters high, which would contain moving glass structures rotating at different speeds. Known as the Tatlin Tower and as a symbol of modernity and the industrial revolution, it was never built and remained a utopian project.

Guilherme Peters recalls this utopia in O sonho de tatlin e o futuro perdido [Tatlin's Dream and the Lost Future]. The artist re-presents the drawing of the rusty Tatlin tower on an iron plate attached to a closed electric circuit. In the circuit, a Russian doll, containing other dolls in it, turns by means of an electric motor and thus plays the part of a resistor, ensuring that the circuit (endowed with energy) will not short (by expending the energy input into it).

There is an opposition of forces: on the one hand the spinning Russian doll refers to the movement of the Tatlin project and implies a reproductive chain or a notion of genealogy — something that would not only maintain the energetic circuit of things but also that guarantees a permanence in the course of history — on the other, with the passage of time, the image of the tower of iron plate is oxidized more and more by the contact with air, and may one day disappear. Peters thus evokes a past condition of projecting a future and simultaneously its supposed failure in the present tense as a manifestation against the banality of the world commodified and based on the appreciation of the novelty and tendencies that we live today.