The Festivals of Landscape Art in Moscow Parks: an Anthropological Analysis

This research presents an analysis of perception of festival spaces by visitors (through the example of the festivals ‘Gardens and people’ and ‘The festival of historical gardens’). In a departure from the previous works focused on the analysis of the ‘festivalisation’ of the urban space, this study explores festivals of landscape art which take place in park spaces in Moscow. The selection of parks, which are radically different in their symbolic content (the monument of the Soviet era (VDNH) and the Palace and Park ensemble (Tsaritsyno)), permits to undertake a comparison study of the following aspects. Primarily it is a study of the discourse and strategies used by organizers and landscape designers through which the festivals of landscape art are ‘fitted’ into different historical contexts. We identify how organizers and designers form the festival space, how they attract visitors, and what kind of experience they offer visitors. In the second place this study answers the question of how the discourse and the festival space, offered by organizers and designers, are perceived by the visitors of festivals, whether they adopt organizers’ rules of behaviour or form their own discourse and practices. As a result of the study we identify that both festival spaces are liminal. Thus, visitors cannot use the familiar behaviour patterns and must invent new ones. Visitors of the festivals experience the liminal condition in different ways due to the differences in the organization of the physical space of the festivals. In one case, the spontaneous actions of visitors are limited to the linguistic and physical level, while in the other, there is a transformation of the identity of visitors, overcoming status differences.