EMPTY CENTER K.

(A short dialogue)

Andrei Monastyrsky / Moscow, Russia

Sabina Haensgen / Bochum, Germany

S. H.: During my visit to the present-day city of Kaliningrad I was impressed by one thing above all: The effect of an empty center in a broad metaphorical sense.

The architectural topography of Kaliningrad still bears traces of a catastrophe. The hubbub of everyday life in the city center, as documented in old photographs, has been replaced by a vacuum, an absence resulting from historic events. In addition to the various forms of reconstruction of historical monuments, I would like to draw attention to this peculiar monument of emptiness.

What kind of contact with emptiness takes place here? The main thing, to my mind, is an effect of estrangement from all literary notions. When you walk along this emptiness, all interpretations are gone and only the concreteness of experience, which cannot be verbalized, remains. In this context, the tremendous negative emptiness, which absorbs everything into itself, can be opposed to another form of emptiness: to consciously accept the empty center as a place of non-existence. For me, acceptance of this emptiness was a quite positive emotional experience. I think it's interesting to discuss this sense of emptiness at the background of more general aesthetic ideas, which are also very important for conceptual ways of thinking about art.

A.M.: Emptiness in the center is the right feeling and state of affairs, because the law of physics always presupposes emptiness in the center: events are concentrated at the margins. Emptiness provides homogeneous and regular structures, and resists the chaos and anxiety of the periphery. Such central places of emptiness make for a conceptual way of thought, which requires distance in order to make possible acts of discursive consideration and thinking. Taking into account the significant fact that Kant's tomb is located on the territory of Koenigsberg, the city is extremely important for the ideological map-plan of Russia, because it connotes European ideology and even "the discourse of mind." In this context Koenigsberg is not a province, it is one of the few centers of Russia. The stated emptiness, which determines and forms the events at the margins, is natural for it as well as for any other center.