(Source: http://archnest.com/ak2010/blog/1253)

A festival of metal work took place in Kaluga Oblast. The second festival of metal work “ArchKuznitsa” was held on the territory of the art park Nikola-Lenivets (Lazy Nikola) in the village of Zvizzhi in the Fur Arcade.

Nikola-Lenivets is situated about 200 km from Moscow in Kaluga Oblast on the banks of the Ugra River. It is the only Russian art park which presents landscape installations, the objects of land art made by the best Russian and foreign authors.

The festival was dedicated to “Russian Cosmism”. The theme of space archeology was formulated at the preparation stage of the festival in discussions with Nicholai Polisskiy: if all things that are most valuable from the point of view of science are located in the sky, then sooner or later they must fall down from the sky, returning everything saved by the man back to earth.

All art objects of the festival serve to a single compositional idea of a falling celestial object, the parts of which disintegrated and fell to the ground at random: some crashed into the building, some fell to the field, etc. Some festival objects bear a trace of Russian mythology in order to emphasize the continuity of these activities.

The art objects of the festival were created in the Russian village on the machines, some of which was saved in the 1990s form the aircraft factories. About 7 tons of rolled metal and a lot of scrap metal were used in this work. The organizers of the festival express gratitude to brothers Oleg and Dmitry Zubkovy - the heads of Copperbrass workshop who came to “ArchKuznitsa” in order to hold a master class on the use of industrial equipment for the festival participants and who stayed to make objects together with these participants. A half of the objects of the festival would have stayed not implemented without their help or would have looked in another way.