"Time of the Moscow River"

The main waterway of the capital from 1919 to 2119: ecological disaster of the 1970s, guppy fish and the Internet of the future.

“The river is what the city begins with” - this is the first words of the Manifesto of the Friends of the Moscow River, the eco and art community, founded in 2018 by architects Yuri Grigoryan, Anna Kamyshan, Taisiya Osipova and geographer Glafira Parinos.

Friends of the Moskva River open the exhibition “Moscow River Time” in the third building of the Provision Warehouses. The exposition is dedicated to the history and ecology of the capital’s main waterway and the anthropogenic impact on it, as well as attempts to present the future of the capital’s water area up to 2119. The goal of the project is to stop perceiving the river as a resource and an object of nature management, building fundamentally new relationships with it.

The items of the exposition are evidence of different stages of the urbanization of the Moscow River. Visitors will see an emergency issue of the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva on April 24, 1926 about floods when the water level rose 7.3 meters, listen to interviews with diggers of the 1990s who studied the tributaries enclosed in the collectors. Museum guests will also find out why the complex system of locks and reservoirs, completed in 1967, destroyed the natural balance of the Moscow River and the Volga, and how in August 1993 a large colony of exotic guppy fish settled in the warm drains of the Kuryanovsky aeration station.

At the exhibition, the history of man, river and the city is shown through a bicentennial timeline with thirty-eight events. From meteorological research of 1919 to projects of MARCHI students of the late 1950s and highways of the 1970s, the construction of which led to an environmental crisis and a change in water composition.

From the construction of the 128-km canal “Moscow - Volga” in 1931 to the natural philosophical essay “Odintzoviana - 1947” by science historian Timofey Ivanovich Rainov (1888–1958). Cosmist Rainov considers organic life as the result of the creative effort of the Earth, and as a moral ideal he preaches the attitude to any natural phenomenon - a stone, planet, river - as a person.

These incredibly modern philosophical thoughts became the basis for urban projects of today, which can only be realized in the future. The second part of the timeline is dedicated to them.

The discovery of an eco-island in 2029, the embedding of a river on the Internet in the 2030s through the WATER AFFECTION program, the launch of river silk production in 2067, the use of bioactive substances to clean the banks and restore ecosystems. The futuristic project ends in 2119 - the date of the post of the Thinker of the River, whose duties include the return of people to those times when observing nature and following its rhythms made up the meaning of existence.

One of the priority tasks for the curators of the exposition was the creation of not only an environmental exhibition, but also an environmentally friendly exhibition. The values that are postulated in the concept were also shown in the design: the eco-friendly corrugated board became the main exhibition material.