In late July, the Archstoyanie festival opens its doors at the Nikola-Lenivets art park, inviting visitors to engage with a theme centered on play and speculation. The 2023 edition embraces the idea of a Guessing Game, turning the landscape into a living dialogue between imagination and space. The festival gathers a cadre of creators who shape the park with temporary and monumental forms that invite interpretation and participation from the audience. This year’s program foregrounds how perception shifts when art and environment intersect, inviting guests to test their hypotheses about what comes next and how landscapes can host futures imagined by their makers.
Architect Alexei Kozyr and artist Irina Korina stand at the core of the festival, guiding a program that blends sculpture, architecture, and performative installation. Kozyr introduces a flagship piece titled the Prediction Capsule, an expansive installation measuring roughly 15 meters across. It is designed as a public drawing space for notes about the future. Participants can contribute their thoughts and predictions, which, after the festival concludes on July 30, will be sealed into the capsule and buried within the grounds of Nikola-Lenivets. The act of burying the capsule becomes a quiet ritual that anchors the conversations of today to the soil of tomorrow, a reminder of how time folds into memory when art invites collective projection.
Irina Korina contributes a distinct intervention created from stretched printed fabrics, living trees, and a network of specially erected tents. This object explores themes of disorientation and the bending of space and time. By weaving fabric, living form, and temporary architecture, Korina constructs an environment where gravity and intuition play against one another, inviting visitors to reconsider their relationship to the park as a site of wonder and speculation. The installation becomes a mutable field where routes and sensibilities shift with light, weather, and movement, encouraging personal encounters with ambiguity rather than a single, fixed reading of the space.
Earlier announcements highlighted a unique performance that will travel aboard a bus heading to Nikola-Lenivets as part of the Archstoyanie festival experience. The bus performance is designed to extend the journey into the artwork itself, transforming the ride to the park into a prelude to the installations awaiting at the site. This mobile encounter reflects the festival’s broader interest in blurring boundaries between mobility, spectatorship, and creation, so audiences might feel the boundary between art and everyday life dissolving as they move closer to the landscape and its speculative narratives.