Now in its twenty-first edition, the Archstoyanie Festival has once again transformed the fields and forests of Nikola-Lenivets in the Kaluga region into one of Europe's most distinctive open-air exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture. This year's theme, Route Rebuilt, explores how we navigate an increasingly uncertain world, inviting visitors to rethink not only the paths they follow through the landscape, but also those they trace through memory, technology and everyday life.

Founded in 2000 in Nikola-Lenivets, the Archstoyanie Festival has grown steadily over the years and now extends across 650 hectares. Its main site is a vast open field beneath an expansive sky, bordered in the distance by a strip of forest. Known as Versailles Park – once ploughed and planted with potatoes – it is currently home to ‘River of Hay (Reka Sena)’, a title that plays on the Russian word ‘seno’ (hay) and the French pronunciation of the River Seine.

Created by the architectural bureau Manipulazione Internazionale, the project is conceived as a spatial performance. It consists of haystacks arranged to resemble a riverbed alongside a 77-metre-long canal. Here, the quintessential central Russian landscape is punctuated by architectural elements transplanted from the city into the forest as an artistic intervention. The canal reflects both the seemingly endless sky and the rotunda by Alexander Brodsky (b. 1955), the festival's oldest pavilion and enduring emblem.

Around Brodsky's rotunda, the artists have created a whimsical evocation of French grandeur, complete with a river, fountains and statues of the French kings Louis by Victoria Chernysheva. From a distance, the figures resemble the plaster monuments of Soviet revolutionary heroes; only on closer inspection do they reveal themselves to be little more than scarecrows fashioned from straw and textiles. Nearby stands the ‘Elf Tower’ by Alexey Ilin (b. 1972), another playful pun on the phonetic similarity between "Eiffel" and "Elf". Taller than a person and resembling a bottle-drying rack in the form of a glass pyramid, the structure is designed to be filled with visitors' messages before being ceremonially launched into the sky at noon on 25 July, in keeping with an old sailors' tradition.

Deeper within the forest lies ‘Personal Limbo’, another installation by Victoria Chernysheva. Once again, the artist works with white fabric, but here it is semi-transparent, layered like drifting smoke to create an immersive environment. Visitors are invited to embark on a sensory journey through undulating veils of mist – a place emptied of everything: no news, no bustle, only solitude. As they chart their own path, they are encouraged to reflect inwardly. As the artist describes it, "whoever finds the path enters an absolute nowhere: time freezes, sound dissolves and trails behind. Only the rustle of fabric remains, making it seem as though the limbo is breathing and its boundaries are drifting."

Beyond the ‘Limbo’ lies the beaver pond, where artist Sergey Katran (b. 1970) has created ‘Autonomous Paradise’, an installation that floats on the surface of the water. Standing on the bridge, the viewer is suspended between two contrasting realms. On one side lies paradise: exotic plants – foreign, almost extraterrestrial visitors – drift inside transparent plastic spheres. Katran grants them a kind of agency, portraying them as freedom-loving explorers venturing into unknown territories. On the opposite side, a circular raft supports the slender trunks of dead birch trees, some stripped bare, others charred, evoking an image of purgatory.

Along the route, visitors also encounter ‘The Stop’, a project by the architectural bureau ‘Master's Plan’, conceived as a place to pause during the journey—or perhaps to change direction altogether. During this year's festival, one of its walls, executed in the style of Soviet monumental art, was expanded through the addition of mosaic fragments created by participants in a public workshop.

From here, the route can shift away from the sweeping landscapes of rural Versailles, paradise and limbo towards the smaller architectural pavilions that originally formed the foundation of the park. Many of these have since been adapted into year-round accommodation, offering visitors the opportunity to spend the night within the artworks themselves. Newly completed this summer and now open for overnight stays is the ‘Pavilion of Delusions’, created by artist Irina Korina (b. 1977) and architect Ilya Voznesensky (b. 1970).

The pavilion was first presented in 2023, when it consisted solely of a metal frame entirely draped in tulle. As it billowed in the wind, the fabric appeared to create walls and shelter, while in reality offering neither. Now, nestled within that evocative veil of grandmotherly tulle, stands a tiny house: clad externally in cool metal sheeting yet unexpectedly warm and intimate inside.

According to Korina, it is a home where one longs to preserve everything that is dear to the heart—a romantic vision of the Russian dacha, assembled from fragments of collective memory. A large stained-glass window frames the setting sun, while a fringed lampshade hangs above a round table and ornamental patterns decorate both the floors and ceilings. In conceiving the project, the artist draws on Gaston Bachelard's ‘The Poetics of Space’, inviting visitors to return to the idea of home not through memory, but through daydreaming.

The theme of home is explored differently in Pavel Suslov's (b. 1984) nomadic project ‘bomjdom’ ('Homeless'). The project has existed since 2011, during which time the artist has built more than 20 unusually shaped houses in locations ranging from the Moscow region to the Caucasus. Pavel has already lived in an egg-shaped house, a tank-shaped house, a seahorse-shaped house, and many others. While the form of the house constantly changes, its walls always serve as canvases that the artist gradually fills with depictions of the surrounding landscape. At Archstoyanie, Pavel Suslov has been living for a month, and the surface of his spherical house is now entirely covered with views of Nikola-Lenivets. In this way, the processes of creation and presentation become one. Inside, the house contains almost everything necessary for everyday life – including, most importantly, the artist's large black cat.

The question of how to navigate and redefine one's path in the age of neural networks is explored in an installation by the Yandex Museum, created in collaboration with artists Alexandra Ostrovskaya (b. 1971) and Kristina Pashkova (b. 1992) through a collective weaving project involving visitors.

‘The Fabric of Answers’ grew out of the Yandex Museum's children's laboratory, where young participants and artists explored the intersection of technology and craft. Kristina Pashkova's artistic practice is rooted in the history of the Jacquard loom and the first punch cards, which later became the foundation of modern computing.

On a black mesh covering the art object ‘Aquarium’, visitors are invited to weave colourful translucent plastic strips, creating their own visual record of how often and in what situations they turn to neural networks. The upper section of ‘The Fabric of Answers’, woven by the artists, follows a strict, regular pattern. The lower section, created by festival visitors, appears to spiral joyfully out of control. The woven lines search for new ways to intersect and position themselves across the grid. Here, quite literally, an orderly route of abstract stripes is transformed by nature into artistic chaos.

Nature itself plays one of the leading roles at the festival. Visitors can hug trees, stand in a field queue for happiness, take part in a laboratory of uncertainty, watch Leonid Tishkov's (b. 1953) private moon drift along the Ugra River at night, or even learn to fly like a bird in Roman Sakin's (b. 1976) installation ‘School of Earthly Flights’.

This is not Sakin's first educational project. A branch of his ‘Athenian School’ was previously established in the Tula region and exhibited in 2024 at the Oktava creative cluster, with the installation provided by collector Anton Kozlov. This time, the artist mapped the flight paths of local birds before transferring them onto the landscape as blue pathways, along which visitors can attempt to fly themselves after undergoing performative training and following specially designed flight markers. By handing out symbolic wings, Sakin invites us to experience something unfamiliar, adopt a bird's logic, and step beyond our habitual understanding of the world.

One final project deserves mention among the approximately fifty presented at this year's festival: Kirill Kto's (b. 1984) performance ‘Illumination’. The street artist, known for cutting giant eyes into the protective mesh covering building façades, has long explored themes of vision and invisibility. Kto asks: who is watching us, and what remains unseen? For his Archstoyanie performance, a semi-transparent portal enclosed with standard banner mesh became the site of a live intervention, as the artist cut a pair of eyes into its surface before the audience. The eyes themselves become a portal between multiple layers of reality. Can we say that, even as we continually redraw our routes between realities, the one enduring rule is never to close our eyes?