Rules of the game
There is no need to talk about what the Nikola-Lenivets art park and the Archstoyanie festival are. Unless, for people who have never been interested in modern Russian architecture and art, but there are definitely no such among our readers.
Everyone who is somehow involved in the creative life of Moscow, the Moscow region and other regions of Russia and the world, including Japan and Holland, knows and loves this place, living its amazing life in the wilds of the Kaluga region, next to the village with the inhuman name of Zvizzhi, reliably protected from the invasion of strangers by superbly broken roads. And every year, all dedicated people visit the park with pleasure, once or twice, and real fans and more often, in order to throw the car in the chopped grass and deep snow, and go towards surprises and new discoveries.
Mandatory surprises are part of the magic, or, if you like, the Nikola-Lenivets "big game". Even if you know well how to go from Nikolina Ukha to Universal Reason, and from there to the Remote Office, do not hope to avoid the joy of the discoverer. The weather and nature here conspire with art and architecture so that no painting or landscape is repeated. While trees grow and fields bloom, art objects live their own lives, something appears, something changes, something disappears. It is for these new impressions that people come here, so that every time, as if for the first time, discover Nikola-Lenivets and experience this inspiring sensation from touching a unique phenomenon, a real treasure of Russian culture.
Playing with art
The Archstoyanie Festival is one of the main suppliers of exhibits to the art park's collection. And every year, visitors to the festival look forward to seeing new objects, followed by a discussion of their chances of becoming not a guest, but a full-fledged inhabitant of the park. But the specialization of the ideologists of the park and the curators of the Archstoyania festival is to break even the most pleasant stereotypes, and from time to time they prepare a surprise for sophisticated connoisseurs of land art and small architecture, holding what the festival producer Yulia Bychkova calls “architectural detoxification” - festivals in which most of the events and objects belong not so much to monumental genres as to the field of interactive theatrical action with all its fashionable variations in the form of happenings, installations and performances that take place in the natural and architectural scenery of the park. This year it is time again to get rid of painful architecture dependence with the help of an equally all-encompassing love for contemporary art.
The festival's curator Anton Kochurkin, in continuation and development of the 2017 festival dedicated to the study of the sacramental question "How to live", proposed an excellent motto "Co-building", as it should be a curatorial theme, which includes many sub-meanings and associations. This concept is of great importance for the old residents of Nikola-Lenivets. Nikolai Polissky says: “Many years ago, together with my friend Alexander Panov, we formulated what this park should consist of - from“Co-buildings”and“Co-creations”. "Co-building" - these are objects with a function, remotely similar to an architectural building. "Co-creation" - everything that is not architecture, beautiful, meaningful, but non-functional, that is created by the artist."
Anton Kochurkin expanded the interpretation of "Co-building", including a research component in it and challenging potential festival participants at the "Open-call" announced in April 2018 to investigate stereotypes and traditions, recurring phenomena of human life, daily routine, as well as inalienable emotions inherent in them: the joy of birthdays and weddings, grief from death and illness of loved ones,anger and despair from betrayal; and try to find analogies for them in natural cycles: the change of day and night, seasonality, phases of the moon … 270 projects were submitted to the competition, of which only 16 were selected. “Each of the projects implemented this year at Archstoyania is a personal interpretation of everyday rituals, characteristic states and their natural identity. For us, as curators of the festival, this became a new experience and a new type of artistic expression, which has not so much architectural as theatrical nature, which demanded from us directorial skills to create a grandiose performance that connects dozens of performances in different parts of the park into a single whole”- so comments Anton Kochurkin on the difficulty of preparing the 2018 festival.
Art within architecture
But if we deceive expectations and break stereotypes, then do it in everything. That is why the main object of the festival “without architecture” turned out to be definitely an architectural object - “Villa PO-2” by Alexander Brodsky, hiding in a dense aspen bush from the hustle and bustle, peculiarly reigning near the pond with the “Ugra” cafe. It took almost two years for the sketch to capture the image of a beautiful villa built of the most controversial and symbolic elements of the construction industry from the Soviet era - concrete panel slabs of the "PO-2" type (for the history of creating slab design, read
here), first turned into an art object, and then, a year later, into a full-fledged residential building capable of sheltering at least 10 people.
The villa was supposed to appear in the Art Park back in 2017. But constant rains and slush did not allow the construction process to be completed, and at the last Archstoyania the organizers, wisely without revealing the details of the production process, presented to the public a light version of the villa in the form of a 6-slab perimeter surrounding a cluster of trees, whose crowns served as a kind of roof …
And the public, it should be noted, was delighted with the docked version. The contrast between brutal, geometric slabs and living trees was too strong and gave rise to an infinite number of interpretations: both the opposition of the natural beauty of nature to the wretchedness of the technogenic world created by our civilization, and the post-modernist joke on the topic of the concrete interpretation of the peristyle, and the prophetic vision of the inevitable apocalyptic future of mankind. But everything turned out to be more prosaic - it was training before the real embodiment of the image.
Last year's villa has sunk into oblivion, leaving behind its improved version, which fully meets the author's intention. And as is often the case with Alexander Brodsky, the author himself is not very keen to clothe his idea in beautiful and conceptual phrases, rightly believing that the work speaks for itself. “Many years ago I noticed our typical concrete fences. And even admired them. And at some point, the thought came to me that it was possible to make a house out of them. There is no philosophy behind this. It's just that what we see every day and which we don't pay attention to all our lives, considering it ugliness, can turn into something very beautiful, - this is how Brodsky himself explains the birth of the idea of "Villa PO-2", - Concrete slabs are decoration surrounding an internal wooden house. Extremely compact, but inside which there is everything you need. This house is my answer to the question "How to live?"
Fragile simplicity
The constructive solution for a “simple house” is not so simple. A metal frame, installed on piles 1.8 meters deep, supports an external hinged system of concrete slabs, each of which was found in abandoned facilities in the Moscow region and has its own history, which is evidenced by various inscriptions carefully preserved for those who like to read "fence essays" … Antique slabs have proven to be unexpectedly impractical building materials. During the construction of the outer perimeter, the brigade had to make special efforts to keep each "rarity" intact and protect it from splitting. Inside, behind the "fragile armor" and a layer of insulation, there really is a wooden house with a central double-height space filled with light penetrating through a long anti-aircraft lamp. Along the perimeter of both levels, there are beds that are equally comfortable both for a feast in front of a real fireplace and for sleeping. For future guests - and "Villa PO-2" will replenish the park's room stock - a comfortable bathroom and a kitchen will be made in the house.
Unraveling the ciphers
The seeming simplicity of the compact house gives visitors another "game" - solving art charades. As always, Brodsky uses the most ordinary things and phenomena in his artistic and architectural projects, with the help of which he manages to reveal an abyss of meanings. Immediately read the contrast of the external and internal world - symbolizing our life with its eternal self-defense against the cruelty and pragmatism of society. For the savvy viewer, the associations with Palladian villas and the almost exact correspondence of the proportions of the PO-2 slabs to the golden ratio will be a pleasant surprise. And the most significant message that Brodsky himself may address to the audience, or maybe we are conjecturing for him, is that with the help of art, even sad and depressing fences can become something about more, to find their own cultural and semantic value.
Nikolay Polissky also expressed his opinion about Villa PO-2: “This facility is incredibly important to me. It represents the standard of "Co-building", in which the architect acts equally as an artist, and it is impossible to draw a line between them. Without the artist, this architecture would not exist. Without architecture, the artist did not express all the variety of inherent meanings. This object will always be the reference. And everyone who wants to build something big, significant in the art park will have to orientate themselves, in terms of expressing meanings, to this brilliant work."
Art versus routine
On the territory of more than 100 hectares during all three days of the festival, from July 27 to July 29, an artistic action took place - each object became a haven for various art projects, the groves announced the rumble of laughter and the play of an accordion, and a guest who accidentally stumbled into the tent camp could find himself in the middle performance, in which the bad habit of eavesdropping is a necessary element of the interactive process. In the cycle of strange actions, meaningful sounds and pictures, with varying degrees of shocking and humanism knocking the audience out of their comfort zone, only park landscapes gave a short respite and, as it were, a breath of "realness". Five minutes to admire birches, clouds and a field overgrown with vetch-oat mixture, and you can return back to the carnival extravaganza of the current "Archstoyanie". Each viewer was free to decide for himself whether or not to guess the messages encrypted in the performances, responding to the theme of the festival and exploring the cyclical and everyday life of the world, to read or not lengthy descriptions of each project, communicate or not with their authors, or simply surrender to the riot of the creative process, giving to the subconscious mind the arrangement of assessments and priorities. A detailed list of projects implemented at Archstoyanie 2018 can be found here, and we will limit ourselves to a small photo report.
Forward into the unknown
Another Archstoyanie has ended and the vacation August has come, but there are new festivals and new competitions ahead for the role of the author of imperishable (or perishable) art objects for Nikola-Lenivets. After "architectural detoxification", next year architecture will return to Archstoyanie again and now everyone who wants to come up with their own project that can surpass Villa PO-2 in archetypal and symbolism, Bernasconi's arch in majesty, and Fast Path in recklessness and poetically - the "Meganoma" shed.
And even if you do not plan to participate in Archstoyanie as the author of the object, still come there, at any time of the year, because you will always find something to be surprised there, for the sake of which to part with stereotypes and make another trip through the “dark forest” and “blooming field - here who is which route is closer.
