NO EXCUSE
Burlesque Harvest Festival at the Palace of Labor
(Omsk, Russia)
The House of Culture has traditionally been a place for Kirov Factory workers to rest and relax. No Excuse is hosting a Harvest Festival and ceremony uniting agricultural and human culture. On that day, wheat, vegetables, House of Culture employees, city residents, cars, and machinery will be joined together in the mystery of fertility, exchanging their energy, juices, and vibrations and creating a shared experimental realm of new relationships and hybrid species. One of the celebration’s central figures, a legendary Kirovets tractor, will appear in unexpected form, revealing its new essence enriched by connections to the world of plants, flowers, vegetables, techno parties, and the spirits of the fields.
The celebration’s program includes a banquet for the House of Culture’s employees and festival guests in the foyer or outdoors (depending on the weather), a mini concert dedicated to the Kirovets tractor featuring House of Culture ensembles and guest performers, a meditation and energizing room with an altar to fertile soil, a spa where vegetables’ touch brings total relaxation and guides your consciousness to the experimental realm, and a vegetable rave room. Tents may be used instead of rooms.
Photo: Nikita Gubin, Yuri Kuzmenko, Anna Salakhetdinova
Video: Maria Rybka
No Excuse is a group of artists from Omsk made up of Maria Rybka, Yuriy Kuzmenko, and Masha Alexandrova. The group engages in flexible healthy living, regular feasting, guerilla gardening, and audio wanderings open to all, rethinking and reappropriating folk holidays. Masha and Maria are graduates of the School of Engaged Art (St. Petersburg); Masha is studying Contemporary Transmedia Art Practice at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia online; and Yuriy and Maria are graduates of Event School of Photography in Omsk. During the pandemic, the collective established an international online artist residency, Omsky Sanatorium. They have shown work at the 2nd Zheleznogorsk Biennale (The Land of Oz), the inclusive art exhibition The Art of Being in Vyksa (their Roadside Weeds Neighboring Travel Bureau), and Art Propaganda (at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts/National Center for Contemporary Art Ekaterinburg).