Uzbekistan (Republic of)

The National Pavilion of Uzbekistan investigates the current scientific and cultural relevance of a modernist scientific structure, the Heliocomplex “Sun”, built in 1987 near Tashkent. The complex is one of only two structures worldwide equipped with a large solar furnace to study material behaviour at extreme temperatures. A typical case of Cold War competition, the furnace was developed after an analogous facility was built in Odeillo, France, in 1969. Once a utopian promise of a radiant future, the complex now exists within a rather dystopian reality in which the future is systematically postponed. Conceived at the gigantic scale of many Soviet infrastructure projects within the rationale of the bilateral division of the world during the Cold War, the furnace appears too big for any existing reality within Uzbekistan. Rather than declaring the complex’s redundancy as a flaw, the pavilion explores the potential of this cognitive crack, its meanings and relevance for science and beyond, asking what urgent questions of contemporaneity it could answer now. This approach would allow for the rethinking of the complex beyond the preservation impulse and to contextualize it within a variety of scientific and cultural agendas.