Curatorial Projects - Konstantin Grouss

"Many city festivals look alike — a stage in the square, familiar performers, listless strolling, and everyone heads home. Fortunately, that’s not the only possible scenario. The word ‘festival’ can also mean contemporary street art, an electronic rave, or the rescue of urban heritage. We asked organizers of unusual festivals in Vyksa, Votkinsk, and Dimitrovgrad how to make it work.

Art-Ovrag, now seven years old, is a major cultural event drawing guests from across Russia, with Russian and Western artists, well-known lecturers and musicians. Konstantin Grouss, curator of its first three years, explained how it was built.

A festival like this comes together out of discoveries. First you study the urban context that exists today — beginning with simple observation and looking for the active young people. They’re stewing in their own juices — they have interests, but no support of any kind, social, material, or informational, to inspire them to keep developing. So the first thing we decided to do was strengthen these people, give them a circle to connect with. A festival is, above all, people talking to each other about particular things.

People living far from big cities perceive whatever happens there as a kind of fairy tale on television. They have their own history, their own everyday rhythm, the same circles they keep going round. Our task was to gently intervene in those circles — which means studying everyday life and looking for symbols within it that haven’t been noticed yet. For instance, when I first came to look at the festival site in the central park, it turned out the whole park was made up of ravines [ovrag]. There used to be an estate there with a cascade of ponds, of which only one remained — the rest had become ravines. That’s how the festival got its name. Another discovery was the unicorn: for the third festival we were thinking about a new symbol for the town, first considered a panther, then found a unicorn on the town’s coat of arms — it had always been there, but nobody had noticed it.

Another task was turning negative symbols into positive ones. Our original commission came from Vyksa’s town-forming enterprise (OMK), which had a problem with young people leaving — new technologies were being developed at the plants, but there was no one to work there. In the first year, walking around the park, there was a pile of syringes under every bush. Over three years, that changed.

We devoted the first festival to subcultural things — rap, street art, extreme sports — and added creativity and art. Hence its slogan: ‘Make Art on Your Street.’ From the second year we added an international dimension; by the third, it was a genuinely large festival — 20 countries, artists, architects, a ‘Public Art’ award. By then people saw their town completely differently — they saw themselves on the map of the world.

A festival’s programme has to be developed specifically for that particular town — finding out what interests people, looking for the context, the living points of contact. Street art is an art of context; good street art always uses context and turns it into art. When authorities simply paint facades and call it street art with no regard for context, the result is kitsch.

At first you need to be prepared for people not understanding — that’s normal. At the second festival, artists painted a portrait of Mayakovsky based on a Rodchenko photograph, on the night before Victory Day. In the morning, residents called the police, saying fascists had painted a portrait of Hitler. We had to explain in the local press that it was, in fact, our own poet — the stern, frowning Mayakovsky.

A festival needs to be built with two or three years of growth in mind, so people’s sense of ‘not for me’ can shift to ‘for me’ — because all the information in the world is available anywhere, anytime. It’s a question of access, and of the intention to find out.”

— Konstantin Grouss, artist / curator / producer