YEAR
2018
CITY
MOSCOW
SERVICE
PUBLIC SPACES & SHOW
THE BRIEF
A cultural centre dedicated to poet Andrei Voznesensky, opened in 2018 inside a 19th-century mansion in central Moscow. The project required transforming an intimate historic space into a living archive — a place where visitors could encounter the poet’s legacy not as a document, but as a physical and sensory experience. The challenge was to make one of Russia’s most formally experimental poets accessible without diluting the intellectual and emotional intensity that defines his work.
MY ROLE
I served as Creative Director, Scriptwriter, and Creative Producer, leading the development of the multimedia narrative concept and all content production. I directed the storytelling framework — defining how Voznesensky’s work would be structured spatially and experientially across both floors of the historic building. I oversaw the creation of all audiovisual and interactive installations, including the speech-recognition piece and the directed sound zoning, ensuring that each element served the narrative logic of the overall experience rather than existing as a standalone feature.
Production was developed by Pitch in collaboration and for architectural bureau Planet 9; referenced in Russian museum and cultural sector press as a benchmark for literary memorial space design.
THE CHALLENGE
Voznesensky’s poetry resists conventional exhibition logic. His work fused word, image, and concept — he invented the “videopoem” as a visual art form decades before digital media existed. A display of manuscripts and photographs would have missed the point entirely. The space needed to operate the way his poetry does: layered, associative, and alive. The additional constraint was the building itself — a two-floor historic mansion on Bolshaya Ordynka with fixed architectural features that could not be altered. Every narrative and media decision had to work within that envelope while still producing an immersive environment.
THE APPROACH
The conceptual move was to treat the space itself as a poem — not a container for one, but an experience that follows the structural logic of Voznesensky’s own work. Rather than a chronological biography, the exhibition is structured around atmosphere and sensation: LED text installations along the staircase create a visual rhythm of his lines as visitors move through the building; gobo projections cast his “videopoems” onto the walls; directed sound zones separate and define each area without physical partition.
The most significant decision was the design of the interactive installation “Rossiya, Voskrese!” — a speech-recognition system with enabled AI that activates when a visitor reads the projected poem aloud, highlighting their spoken words in real time on the wall. This reversed the conventional museum relationship between visitor and text: here, the visitor does not read a poem displayed in a case — they perform it, and the space responds. The result is an experience where poetry stops being an object to observe and becomes something you can make happen.
THE RESULT
The centre is an independent cultural institution. It was opened in May 2018 and established itself as one of Moscow’s most distinctive literary cultural spaces — a working archive, event venue, lecture hall, and exhibition simultaneously. The multimedia complex supports rapid transformation between modes, allowing the same space to function as a cinema, a performance stage, or an intimate gallery without technical disruption. The interactive digital library gives visitors direct access to Voznesensky’s collected works from within the space itself. The project demonstrated that a memorial cultural centre does not have to be a monument to the past — it can be a space where a writer’s thinking continues to operate in the present.