Nikola-Lenivets Art Park

The artist Nikolai Polissky moved to this village in the late 1980s and began making large structures with local people out of what was to hand - hay, brushwood, snow, unmilled timber - and it grew into a park of around 650 hectares along the Ugra, with several dozen works standing in fields, on hillsides and at the forest edge. Nothing is small: a lattice tower of woven branches, a wooden aqueduct, a bordering structure on the boundary of the Ugra national park, and a rotunda by Alexander Brodsky whose interior is lined with salvaged doors. The Archstoyanie festival each summer commissions new work and draws thousands to a field with music and installations; the rest of the year the park is quiet and the pieces are walked between over several kilometres. Works are built to weather and some are burned deliberately at the Maslenitsa festival, so the contents change from year to year.

What you actually see

• The scale - dozens of large structures spread over 650 hectares of field and forest.
• The local material - hay, brushwood and unmilled timber worked by village hands.
• Brodsky's rotunda - a structure lined inside with salvaged doors.
• The impermanence - works left to weather, and some burned at Maslenitsa.

When to go

May to September; Archstoyanie is in summer and Maslenitsa in late winter. A day, or stay overnight.

Honest expectations

The park is large and involves several kilometres of walking, or a bicycle. The last road is unpaved and hard after rain. Facilities are limited outside festival weekends and prices rise sharply during them. Some works listed online have already been burned or have collapsed.

Nearby

The Ugra national park surrounds it; Kaluga is about an hour and a half away.