HANAMI IN BERIN: TV-ASAHI-KIRSCHBLÜTENALLEE
EACH SPRING, BERLIN emerges from the frozen temperatures of Central-European winter with an incredible show of color: thousands of cherry trees blooming all across the city.
GOROGOA: WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
AS THE LINE between mobile and non-mobile gaming becomes increasingly blurred, there’s a tendency to qualify games that exist in both realms as being primarily part of the former, and only secondarily part of the latter.
PHOTO GALLERY: CINEMAS OF THE BERLINALE
All photos taken during Berlinale 2018, 15-25 February 2018.
WATCHING TARKOVSKY IN THE WITNESS
THERE IS A vast openness – visually, thematically, atmospherically – to any given Tarkovsky film that feels easy to attribute to the monumental scale of Russia, both in its history and its sheer physical size. But this too-easy association belittles an artist who brought immense visions to life as much in spite of his homeland as because of it.
HOLIDAYS IN SOVIET SANATORIUMS
AT THE CENTER of the Venn Diagram of Brutalist architecture, spa culture and Communist kitsch lies the Soviet sanatorium. In its heyday, the USSR had a network of hundreds of such centers across dozens of territories, from Estonia to Kazakhstan to the Russian Far East. Though their roots lie in the Russian tradition of curative baths, the sanatoriums of the 20th century shoehorned nicely into Soviet ideals of health and responsible rejuvenation, with workers encouraged to check themselves in yearly for a tune-up of their corporal machinery.
ART WITHOUT DEATH: RUSSIAN COSMISM
THE ROOTS OF Russian Cosmism lie in the transcendental utopian writings of the 19th-century philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, who advocated for, among other things, the exploration of space and a literal overcoming of death. Inextricably tied to the Russian Revolution and the rise of the USSR, Cosmism promoted broad ideals that mirrored the heart of Communism: that humanity should collectively strive to transcend the petty, temporary, and mundane.