Stand "Secrets of the Maya"
Pavilion Floriculture, VDNKh, Moscow
The "Secrets of the Maya" stand is one of three unique stands in the world, developed and built by our company for the Floriculture pavilion at VDNKh, as part of the "Museum of the Ant" project, and was designed by us in 2019. The full production cycle, from idea to installation, took about a year. Now the stand has already been installed at the site and is awaiting the completion of preparatory work in the pavilion, for the settlement and adaptation of the ant colony and subsequent launch.
In the meantime, we invite you to familiarize yourself with some facts, characteristics and functionality of the stand.
This stand was conceived from the very beginning as a highly artistic art object. Much attention was paid to the spectacle factor. In the manufacture of the stand, a large number of natural minerals (amethyst, amazonite, fluorite, quartz, morion, citrine and many others), crystals, geodes, semi-precious and precious stones, including untreated rubies, emeralds, sapphires, tourmaline, aquamarine were used. Each mineral has its own changeable and independent from other objects backlight, which is turned on by the user, using interactive control buttons. The entire surface of the exposition part of the stand is made of fluorescent materials that change their color under ultraviolet light, due to which, with one push of a button, the stand, in the literal sense, is completely transformed and appears before the visitor in a completely new image.
There are 4 different sections of the formicarium for the ants to live in:
- 2 wooden ones, made from natural tree trunks;
- 1 plaster, made in the form of an archaeologists' house, with a reed roof and on bamboo piles;
- a formicarium made in the cavities of natural crystalline geodes placed inside a pyramid. Each of them has controlled lighting.
The ants will move freely throughout the entire area of the exhibition stand, populating and mastering all the sections intended for them.
Any museum visitor will be able to turn day into night, summon a thunderstorm, turn on the river flow, and make all the crystals installed on the stand shine and shimmer by pressing buttons. We hope that this stand, after being populated by ants and launched, will become a real Instagram star.
The manufacturing process was very creative. We had to develop a number of special materials and mixtures to achieve such vivid light effects, and also sort through hundreds of different minerals together with gemologists, studying their fluorescent properties under ultraviolet light.
