Thirty-Three Characters. The letter "Ф"

The festival "Thirty-Three Signs", dedicated to the Cyrillic alphabet, was held in St. Petersburg. In the Central Exhibition Hall various interesting materials were exhibited, the festival participants held lectures on the history of the alphabet and typography. The installations in the form of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet appeared in the city streets, gardens and squares as part of the festival on the streets of the city. It was not known in advance where the installations would appear. I saw some huge volumetric letters by chance, I was just passing by and they caught my attention. I searched for other installations on purpose, with an approximate idea of which area of the city I should limit my search to.

The letter "Ф" was placed in Rumyantsevsky garden not too far from the "Ц" that I told you about recently. These letters I saw by chance. It was a warm day and I went into the Rumyantsev Garden to relax on a bench near the fountain. The lawn with the fountain and benches looked like this:

I didn't expect to see anything special and just admired the green foliage, but my brain couldn't miss the unusual figure in the back of the alley that wasn't there before. Some vertical metal bars and rectangles turned at different angles... I had to stand up to get closer.

The Cyrillic letter "Ф" (Latin for "F") is easy to read if you stand directly in front of this letter. If you look from the side or approach from one of the side alleys, it is difficult to understand what is depicted.

Here is what the author of this installation, artist Ekaterina Filipenko, says: "A lonely, inconspicuous, but nevertheless unique and inimitable letter F. The letter F has not appeared in the Russian alphabet for a long time. And in our language there is not a single native Slavic word for this letter. Even Pushkin universally neglected the wonderful letter F. For example, in the "Song of Oleg Veschem" it does not occur even once. Besides Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov also rarely included the letter F in their works. And just because the morphology of the Russian language unfairly ignores F, I decided to do a "feint with my ears" and create this Art object. Let the factual indifferent focus of your gaze be fixed on the Frontal Phase of the Factural Figure F!"