Rocking chair of my childhood - in Kyiv, Hydropark

In the Kiev Hydropark there is an interesting place where local eccentrics pump muscles on simulators made of scrap metal.
Weightlifters began the construction of this sports complex back in the 70s of the last century.
Today, in the "rocking chair" you can find both young people and brave pensioners who are not afraid of either frost or heat.




In a huge park on the banks of the Dnieper, you can find simulators for all muscle groups. They are made of scrap metal, car parts, building blocks, wooden planks and other junk.



These photos are taken from the album "Kachalka. Muscle Beach" by photographer Kirill Golovchenko.

In choosing topics for his projects, Golovchenko is usually guided, first of all, not by their market value, but by his own "visual interests," as he stressed in an interview with Deutsche Welle. An open-air gym interested him back in 2010. Since then, Golovchenko has visited the Hydropark five times, photographing amateur bodybuilders for one or two weeks.



"I was shocked. I think it was love at first sight," says the photographer. "Then I looked again, in more detail, and the "rocking chair" impressed me even more. These sculptures, I can't find any other name for simulators, you just need to put them in a museum. This is, if you like, modern land art, new constructivism."

Kyrylo Golovchenko was interested not only in the shapes, but also in the color that dominates Kyiv's open-air fitness center: faded blue, which he believes is a typical Soviet color. "It becomes unclear what time period we are in at all. And this begs the question: can all this exist at the same time as Ukraine hosting Euro 2012? It looks like a mockery," says the artist. "But in fact, what is happening there is a kind of avant-garde, even if everything looks old."



The German media are interested in the Kachalka project, because they see in it ideology and symbolism, and not just an unusual picture, Kirill Golovchenko believes. The popular German magazine NEON published several pictures that were included in the new book. "Ukrainian bodybuilders in a free open-air gym are better trained than monthly membership holders in a German fitness club, who pay seventy euros a month and never go there," notes reviewer Jakob Schrenk, who praised Golovchenko's work.

Photos of the Kachalka project were also published by another German publication, GEO magazine. One of the readers responded to this publication as follows: "The report perfectly reflects the Ukrainian soul in the era of a breakthrough into modernity. The fitness park has become a real cultural asset, which illustrates the liberation of Ukraine from the pressure of the Soviet Union. Therefore, it should be included in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List."



Spiegel Online also saw a meaningful metaphor in Golovchenko's works. "From all this bodybuilding with its pushes and jerks, a new, ambitious image of Ukraine is emerging. The will of the country, whose political system balances between democracy and oligarchy, looks almost intimidating," writes Spiegel Online in a review of the book. The "jocks" from the Hydropark have become the face of modern Ukraine for the correspondent of the Tagespiegel newspaper Jens Mühling, who personally got acquainted with them and with the homemade "rocking chair" simulators during the European football championship.













Source: imgur.com, www.dw.de