Description and conception of "The Palace"
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, 1998
Page 1 of 4
Foreword to the Installation
Studying a boundless area of utopias and projects, at first you begin to drown in the gigantic sea not only of all kinds of proposals and beginnings, but also in the abundance of the goals and ideas which guided their inventors and authors. Gradually, it is possible to discern a few groups of such intentions.
An enormous quantity of projects fall under the heading which could be designated as "Power and Control": all possible forms of management, regulation, observations, etc. The main idea that dominates in all these projects is the complete mastery of the situation, the gravitation of everything to one centre, to the author of the project himself and to the place where the author or the one using it is located.
Another group of projects is guided by the ideas of blackmail and the threats of total annihilation. The authors invent possibilities for subjecting as many people as possible, all of humanity in their extreme forms, to fear and desperation with the aid of special mechanisms or directed cosmic rays. The authors are inspired by the idea of the destruction of this world, moreover, destruction that is total and instantaneous.
A large group of projects is connected with the idea of movement guided by the principle: "farther, higher, faster." Here belong not only all types of new methods for terrestrial transportation, but also an enormous quantity of fantasies about space flights, the reaching of extra-terrestrial civilizations, travels around the Universe, etc. To the "transportation" projects we can also add a gigantic group of projects involving all possible kinds of connections and contacts, an area that is truly developing today at phenomenal speed. Furthermore, today we can already say that many of these "communications projects" cannot really be called projects, since virtually all of them are already in a stage of technical development or have already been realized or will be in the very nearest future.
There are still a few other types and groups of projects which could be described and analyzed, but this is not how we see our goal and task. The concept of the work proposed by us - which of course also has to be treated as yet another project - is to turn one's attention to the type of concepts and proposals in which one main characteristic dominates: the transformation and improvement of the world, furthermore, it is not important whether this concerns other, "distant" people or one individual person and his "relatives." In all the projects of this type exists the idea of freedom and the expansion of social or personal opportunities, and no matter how unrealistic and utopian they may appear, the dream and hope inherent in them give the authors the right to return to them again and again, to analyze and discuss them. But in addition to all of this, they, in our opinion, deserve even more. These projects, guided by such criteria, should not only be collected, described and catalogued, but they should also be arranged in a specially constructed space where these projects can be exhibited along with their descriptions for a general overview.