Chagaboogers is an installation we created for the Archstoyanie festival in the forests of the Kaluga region in 2014.

That year our group worked at the festival both as curators of the entire event and as artists creating our own pieces.


The project began as a simple, mischievous joke:

if the whole festival is about freedom and permission, then “anything is allowed”… including the forbidden idea that kids can “eat boogers.”

For Chagaboogers, we made a series of large sculptural noses and mounted them directly onto trees. Each nose had a small ladder. Children could climb up, stick their hands into the giant nostril, and dig around.

Inside the nostrils we hid candy.

So yes — the children really did end up “eating the boogers.”

Exactly the joke we intended.