Water drop
This year, "Art-Ovrag" is being held for the ninth time and, as always, the organizers of the festival are: United Metallurgical Company, the OMK-Uchastiye Charitable Foundation and the administration of the city of Vyksa, as well as a team of curators of the 8 lines project group led by Yulia Bychkova and Anton Kochurkin, prepared a rich and varied program, focusing on the achievements of the last few years in three days. For the attentive viewer, the festival can serve as a “drop of water” by which one can judge the existence of an “ocean” of efforts and daily work of many people, residents of Vyksa and guests of the city who come here to share their talents, knowledge and experience.
Benefits and parametrics
For the past few years, the organizers of the festival, when choosing projects for implementation, have given preference to functional and practical objects. It is an effective way to enable citizens to experience contemporary design and architecture in their Vitruvian twist. A very weighty and spectacular exhibit has been added to the collection of "useful art" this year - in the central park on the bank of the "Lebedinka" pond, next to one of the unofficial symbols of the city - a huge unicorn, assembled from many tablets (by Gabor Miklos Szoke (Hungary), 2013), a pavilion was opened, which received the name "Pavilion of the Future". The architects of the Novoye bureau combined in the project the traditions of park architecture and modern methods of parametric modeling, thanks to which they managed to fit several multifunctional spaces in a compact volume. Read more about the Pavilion of the Future project.
in an interview with architect Sergei Nebotov. In one of the most popular corners of the park, a platform has appeared, where open master classes, lectures, film screenings, exhibitions and even dance lessons will be held. And judging by the interest in the pavilion on the part of the townspeople during the festival, it will not be empty. Moreover, the residents of Vyksa are taking part in the development of the program of events.
Time and energy
Once again, a project invented by a resident of Vyksa was included in the number of objects implemented at Art-Ovrag. Last time it was a huge soccer ball (2018 is the year of the World Cup), and this time it is a giant multimedia sculpture similar to a DNA spiral, called "Binary Clock" (by Andrey Matchin), showing the time in a binary system and at the same time serving as a tester of the citizens' mood thanks to the backlighting system, the color of which changes depending on the results of the online survey on the Vyksavkurse portal page in VK. Green backlighting means that most of the respondents are happy, and red means that people are not happy with something. The object was manufactured by OMK and installed at one of the busiest roundabouts in the city.
Another installation by artist Maria Kechayeva was installed on the main festival square of Metallurgists. A group of bright yellow bicycles on props, equipped with different turntables, bulbs and noisemakers, resembled a gym, but did not symbolize the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, but the need to look for alternative sources of energy, including the positive energy of people, especially children, with the pleasure of pedaling.
Metal and paint
The second day was marked by the launch of a one-of-a-kind Industrial Street Art Park on the territory of OMK. Murals and graffiti created over the past years of the festival have become one of the most visible and attractive elements of the urban environment for Vyksa guests. The attitude of the residents to the paintings was ambiguous and, perhaps, therefore, or to further stimulate the actively developing program of industrial tourism, within which everyone can get into the workshops of the Vyksa Metallurgical Plant, but now new works of monumental graphic art will be created on the walls of the buildings VMZ. The concept of the street art park, developed by the curator Olga Pogasova, assumes a consistent artistic understanding of one workshop after another. On the basis of a competition, within 10 years, artists will be selected who will be able to transform the specifics of a particular production process into a work of art and embody it on a macro scale.
At the opening of the park, the first work created by the Moscow artist Alexei Luka was presented: he captured the geometry of the parts produced by the workshop in his own abstract manner. The sketch for the mural was agreed with the workers of the plant, who then took part in the painting and themselves built several art objects that were installed next to the building during the opening of the street art park.
Wheels and boards
Although art objects brought fame to Art-Ovrag, sports events were included in its program from the very beginning. The idea to hold the festival in Vyksa came from the management of the OMK-Uchastiye Foundation as a response to the problem of drug trafficking among young people. Popularization and development of infrastructure for sports, especially its fashionable varieties such as parkour, workout and skateboarding, have become one of the main activities of the foundation. In addition to holding competitions and performances of sports stars at the festival, the foundation is building sports grounds in different districts of the city. This year, next to one of the central squares, on the site of a former wasteland, a new skate park was opened. The opening ceremony was attended by the governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region Gleb Nikitin, and he did not limit himself to speech and cutting the red ribbon, but rode both on a scooter and on a skateboard. Then the skatepark was tested by several members of the Russian skateboarding team.
Theater and rap
During the festival days, the city of Vyksa lives in a special mode of an enduring holiday. Someone with the children goes to the main square, someone with the whole family goes to the park, to the stadium, to an exhibition in a museum or gallery to listen to a lecture or take part in a workshop. The festival program involved every popular venue in the city.
On the main square, almost according to the medieval tradition, they united a fair and a booth with visiting artists. The engineering theater AXE was in charge of the "mystery", a laureate, in particular, of the "Golden Mask" - he showed the play "Foam of Days" based on the book of the French writer Boris Vian. The most complex twists and turns and dramas were played out inside an ingenious set: a wooden frame cube, which turned into a room, then into a city, opening up endless space for the imagination of the audience. Of course, it was not without the obligatory blowing of the fire and a separate gift for the children's audience in the form of an abundant stream of soap suds.
The one-of-a-kind hip-hop battle "The King of Poets" was held here on the square, in which the graduates of the "Freestyle Workshop" by Lev "RE-pac" Kiselev threw a rap challenge to the classical poetic tradition.
The organizers of the festival showed an unexpected sensitivity to the latest trends in musical culture and made rap almost the main musical direction of the program. To the already mentioned freestyle rappers who accompanied the important events of Art-Ovrag with rhymed impromptu, including the opening of the Industrial Street Art Park, one can add the performance of one of the most popular hip-hop performers in Russia - the rapper Feduk, a bright final point festival. The concert of the headliner of the program gathered an audience of many thousands, which consisted not only of his young fans from among the residents of Vyksa, but also of their parents.
Yesterday Today Tomorrow
The curators have chosen the provocative slogan "When today becomes tomorrow" as the motto of the Art-Ovrag festival of 2019. Its provocative nature lies in the obvious contrast between what Vyksa is: despite decades of efforts by OMK and the OMK-Uchastiye Foundation, it still looks like hundreds of Russian cities - and the futuristic images our imaginations paint. Yes, today's Vyksa is a city with many problems typical for small towns in Russia: broken roads, chaotic and dilapidated buildings, against which the signs of retail chains look like lurid patches, but this city, unlike many others, was lucky with the management of the plant and the administration. who decided to make an alternative future possible and began to change the city step by step, square by square, yard by yard. Let the changes do not occur as quickly as we wanted and dreamed at the beginning, but they are implemented systematically, inventively and purposefully. “As part of the festival, we show the transformations of the city of Vyksa, each of which represents a part of the future city we are striving for,” the festival's curator Anton Kochurkin commented on the choice of the slogan.
But behind the futuristic interpretation of the slogan, there is another semantic level that is important to see. The word "tomorrow", usually interpreted as a symbol of the distant future, can be understood literally as the next day that will come after the end of the festival "today". And in this case, it turns out that the festival serves as a demonstration platform for those projects and concepts that are now being introduced and implemented in the city. Today's presentation of a new skate area in a solemn atmosphere with the participation of the governor, or an art gallery, or a parametric pavilion, will change tomorrow to a normal, full-fledged functioning mode with the participation of local residents. So, literally, in Vyksa, “today” becomes “tomorrow” and “the day after tomorrow”, and “after-after-tomorrow”, and then no one can remember that “yesterday”, when the townspeople did not have wonderful stops, courtyards, glowing optimistic inscriptions in the forest, graffiti on the walls, installations on the embankments, unicorns in parks, and most importantly - the feeling that the city is alive and developing, that it has a future that you want to realize in order to see with your own eyes.
