At some point the festival Signal, which normally takes place in Nikola-Lenivets—the same Kaluga-region park where Archstoyanie happens—invited us to their winter event at the ArtPlay art cluster in Moscow.

Since it was New Year’s season, they suggested we make a Christmas tree.

This was during the era when the mayor of Moscow was aggressively renovating the city: everything wrapped in striped green-and-white construction banners, jackhammers everywhere, tiles being replaced again and again, roads torn open, tram lines rerouted, buses shuffled, constant dust, constant noise.
A moment of chaos.
A moment of protests.
A moment when the spirit of resistance and sarcastic commentary was still alive, not yet crushed.

So, surfing that wave of madness and feeling extremely young, bold, and maximalist, we went around the city and cut down construction banners from various sites.

From these stolen skins of renovation, we built a metal frame and wrapped it entirely in the banners — creating a “Christmas tree” that looked exactly like a construction site, because it basically was one.

On real Moscow banners you’d usually see some cheerful promise like:

“A new playground will be built here soon — please wait patiently.”

So we made our version of that joke:
a construction object labeled “A Christmas tree will be built here soon.”

A seasonal monument to renovation hysteria, protest humor, and the city’s eternal ability to remake itself into something equally absurd.