What are the functions of a curator and what is your Art-Yards program in Vyksa?
Svyat Murunov:
My task is to involve the residents of the city in real changes in the environment. Together with colleagues, Mikhail Priemyshev and Yuri Pankiv, who acted as co-curators, we developed a program based on the ideology of Vyacheslav Leonidovich Glazychev and the technology of social design. The essence of our approach is to construct a subject - a community of residents or a group of communities - through reflection, with the transfer of competencies of self-organization on real examples. This technology, developed by the Center for Applied Urban Studies, in our opinion, is more effective than participatory design, especially taking into account the tasks set before us by the organizers of the Art-Ovrag festival, since it allows us to build a clear sequence: from the creation of subjects to the formation of a position by them and its implementation. It is necessary to use different approaches to engagement, but they need professional analysis and criticism, taking into account the specifics of the context.
The Art Courtyards program was launched in 2014. Since then, both its positive results and a number of errors in the implementation methodology have become apparent. Judging by the attitude of residents to the courtyards completed in previous years, they did not perceive them as a result of joint work. There was no full-scale engagement. We were invited to join the festival team in order to change the situation and bring the Art-Yards project to a new level.
Our proposed program included several key stages: urban research, identifying real needs and real activists, teaching residents the skills of analysis, forming group initiatives and communities of activists, implementing test sites and launching local strategies. We are convinced that development is a priority for local residents, and local identity is a key resource. It is necessary to help residents to implement independent projects, but in no case do all the work for them.
How can you evaluate the intermediate results of your work? What did you manage to do in two years, and what did not work out?
During the first year, we focused on analyzing the current situation in the city and on preparing for entering the terms of reference for the courtyards. Started with
urban planning analysis and launched the citizen's questionnaire.
The CPA network experts conducted several expeditions and workshops with residents. These studies were primarily attended by sociologists - Maria Leontyeva, Maria Chernova, Yuri Pankiv, architects - Alisa Barannikova, Mikhail Priemyshev, Valentina Grigorieva, designer Polina Fokina and photographer Anton Akimov, who made a series of photographs on the state of the Vyksa courtyards:
Dvora-khutor, Dvora-fortress, courtyard at Pirogova, 7, courtyard in the 52nd "Orange Quarter", courtyard at Yubileiny, 11.
Our sociologists have studied the life of courtyards, conducted in-depth interviews with activists identified through questionnaires, publications in the media, and simply through conversations on the streets. We organized
meetings with residents, and also held workshops in which we taught citizens to analyze data, coordinate efforts and come up with a collegial solution. In the course of our work with local residents, the technology "Passport of the Yard" was born - a publicly available document in which information about the various parameters of the yard is accumulated by the residents themselves.
The range of technologies used included: field research (framework method / method of social scenarios / yard as text and others), as well as cultural mapping - this technique allows you to determine what basic structures are in the city and in what form they are presented. For example, it turned out that for the Vyksa residents, unique porches near private houses and such rarities as carpet beaters are more important. Based on the information collected,
lecture-reflection "Carpet beater - as the cultural code of Vyksa."
With a fairly strong rapprochement with the locals, we declared and strictly followed the main principle: “You live here - we have arrived for a while. If you want to change something, we can teach you, but we will not do anything for you. This was the only way to break the stereotype that appeared after the first art courtyards that “good uncles” would come and do everything themselves, even if the locals did not like it.
However, we have found a new role for ourselves. Meetings with residents, discussions at workshops, conversations in the courtyards gave me an idea with Mikhail Priemyshev and Anton Akimov
The “City Workshop” is a micro-pavilion that plays the role of a multifunctional zone and an accent that marks the place where the creative process takes place.
We built it at Art-Ovrag in 2017 and for three days it was full of vigorous activity (photo and video
here), which resulted in TK for courtyards. Everything was done by the residents themselves. Everyone could choose a role to their liking: architect, moderator, director, musician, artist, designer, carpenter; and every day started with the exchange of news and the generation of ideas. It was an amazing experience of implementation through co-creation, generation of ideas and their instant implementation. Local musicians, poets, reenactors and handmakers, who had no place at the festival in previous years, joined the Workshop. And in the Workshop they felt involved and significant. I can say that the "City Workshop" became the main achievement and the strongest experience of the first year of our program.
Another of the successes of the first year should be noted the established community of urban activists, for example, in the Druzhba microdistrict, 29 a club of young families was formed that did not wait for the program, but began to improve their yard and help large families.
I refer to the failures of the first year as the incomplete comprehensive study of the city. Despite the fact that we have been planning and discussing it for a long time both with the curators and with the city administration, it has not yet been fully implemented.
The second systemic failure is all the TK for the courtyards that we collected together with the residents, in the end,
were not included in the program "Comfortable urban environment" - although initially the goals were just such. The reason is simple - there was no money for a working project on a unique technical specification and the deadlines set by the Ministry of Construction were extremely tight. But this was expected and to some extent useful, as it made it possible to test the system for readiness for real changes.
What did the team work with residents in 2018?
A clear and targeted approach was chosen this year. We continued to work with those courtyards and communities who began to cooperate with us back in 2017 and were ready to take independent action. After the City Workshop we came up with the Mobile Workshop format and planned a creative raid across several courtyards. Funding covered five projects that we selected from the courtyards participating in previous events.
Since the beginning of 2018, we drove through each courtyard, updated analytical data, gathered all active residents in the residence and discussed with them the schedule, format and technology: only residents build - we advise / help. We provide the main resources at the expense of the festival. All that is missing is that residents buy everything themselves. A prerequisite is the participation of different social and age groups. Decisions are made through collective discussion and full consensus.
Our marathon took place in May. The "mobile workshop" in a marching group of Mikhail Priemyshev and me, as well as Yuri Pankiv and Vitaly Ofitserov from the Nizhny Novgorod CPU moved from one yard to another, staying in each for a couple of days. From morning to evening, there was a construction-communication-samovar, football or basketball after construction, testing of objects, watering flowers. All objects were designed and built "on the fly" - the previous developments were adapted and improved on the spot, immediately discussed and resolved security issues and options for additional functions. Full photo report can be viewed
here.
The best part is that almost every courtyard has formed a friendly community, which has shown its ability to make decisions, distribute the load, work together and relax. After the end of the work, the residents together made a decision - whether to take on the balance of new objects and what to do with them next. We discussed the issues of exploitation, budget financing - maybe for the first time people thought about how the system of local self-government can and should work.
Of the super-pluses - the active participation of children and adolescents, who became equal participants in the project, offered their ideas and discussed them in a general circle. Vyksa has its own specifics - most men work in shifts at factories and could not take an active part in our Workshops. Therefore, we had to build a yard, mainly with teenagers and with 2-3 men who came from the shift and were not very tired. Somewhere there were women's courts, somewhere men's, but everywhere young people and children were active participants. It was very nice to see how they worked with passion, forgetting about phones and gadgets. Like Tom Sawyer, it was our turn to sand and paint. The teenagers had time to ask about their professions, including how to enter the Moscow Architectural Institute. It turns out that despite the Internet and the abundance of information, they are completely confused about their life strategies. We made a note for ourselves that we must definitely come in August and make a bunch of them with them for new professions.
The main advantage is the real involvement of residents and the implementation of projects that are unique in format. For example, we built a coworking tribune on Football Square, a basketball-up on Red Square, and a stage with a complex landscape on Druzhba. We managed to start relations between the courtyards - a resident of one of the courtyards presented oak seedlings from her nursery to all the other courtyards, another resident helped us organize tea drinking with a samovar, and there were many such examples.
Of the minuses, it should be noted the failure to involve city services in the work in the courtyards. Based on our main principle - everything is done by the residents themselves - they were also supposed to write letters to the Councils. We prepared forms for them, but people do not believe in the response from above so much that they did not even try. Although a number of deputies, especially a deputy from the Druzhba village, who became the soul of the whole process, supported the project.
What other specific features of Vyksa as a city and as a venue for the festival can be noted?
Vyksa is a settlement, a city-plant. The entire coordinate system and all cultural codes in the city are tied to the factory history. Vyksa lives in the rhythm of the plant, but the city's landscape is more complex and diverse. For eight years now, the Art-Ovrag festival has become a part of urban culture, but residents perceive it mainly from a pragmatic standpoint, as an opportunity to get something for themselves, earn or save money. Associated with this are the mistakes that took place with the first courts. This initiative was greeted by the townspeople with maximum trust and hope, and as a result, it turned into a freebie gift from the factory and generated social inequality between residents of different courtyards. Only in recent years, changes in this situation have been noticeable, groups of townspeople have begun to form, ready to seriously understand what a city is, and what a festival is in it, and how they are connected with each other. This tendency can and should be developed.
The plant that allocates resources for the festival does not yet deeply feel and understand the city for which the festival can and should become a trigger of a new culture not related to the plant tradition. And for this, the festival program requires projects and programs that are directly related to the creation and development of local communities, local centers of communication and culture. This does not require large budgets. Changes begin when local activists are involved in organizing events, who intuitively feel the request of the townspeople and can respond to it using the competencies of third-party managers and curators. An example is Artemofest in Uryupinsk, which showed how urban changes can be launched without big budgets and superstars.
What will happen to the Art-Yards program next? What do you plan to do for the next festival?
The program developed by us is designed for three years and the final stage will organically continue the changes begun. If in the first year we studied the situation, in the second we experimented, then in the third year we planned to disseminate the experience gained to the widest possible audience. We plan to hold a Courtyard School in Vyksa to teach everyone to form communities and collectively develop technical specifications. With the five courtyards that were built this year, we are going to go to work projects, and we also want to introduce smart yard technologies, including adaptive lighting, security systems and automatic irrigation. It is necessary to develop, together with residents, a commercial functionality and an event program for each courtyard. It is necessary to institutionalize courtyard communities, creating TPSGs or NGOs on their basis. It is necessary to set up work with the local administration, management companies and deputies. I am preparing an educational program "Deputy 2.0." and I want to test it in Vyksa. In addition, local entrepreneurs became interested in the City Workshop format as a business, and local designers are thinking about creating a creative cluster as a cooperation of different specialists, similar to the Workshop.
At the same time, Mikhail Priemyshev and the CPU team are launching the Yard on Demand service, where we will share technologies, projects and examples of the City Workshop facilities. We will prepare teams for similar projects in other cities. As a presentation, we plan to demonstrate the design technology in the Workshop format at the Zodchestvo 2018 festival.
