An relevant artistic practice is working with the cultural context and analyzing it using artistic means. This is the basic concept of the PARAHOMECRAFTS project: it is the exhibition of works of modern artists, which are paraphrases of artistic homecraft products. It is well known that the essence of homecrafts has changed. Initially cheap, merely utilitarian, hand-made, anonymous issues are now expensive, industrial, copyrightable souvenirs, and this distorted vision may be the main cultural brand in some Volga Region localities. However, is the way, in which the artistic homecrafts and handicrafts that evolved even before the industrial revolution express the local cultural identity, sufficiently adequate? The PARAHOMECRAFTS project suggests rejection of the traditional form while recovering the substance of an artistic work and revealing the role of the tradition in formation of the modern visual medium. Here, combination of the modern and the traditional is not purely accidental. Existence of the man within modern civilization is far from harmony: to a great degree this is associated with the fading feeling of world integrity, the feeling of dissociation. Along with the ritual and folklore, a folk handicraft or a homecraft is a vehicle for conveying the semantic fullness of the world that is integral for the archaic culture. The modern art, in our opinion, may be the only social practice, which is aimed at reaching universal communication and has not yet discredited itself, unlike politics or religion. The PARAHOMECRAFTS exhibition (from Greek para: near, along, out of) is an effort to combine the modern plastic means and elements of the traditional art. The participants exhibit their structural (sometimes literally) approach to the tradition: they treat it not only as a treasure or dust (which should be shaken off in order to make the next step), but as a material which has a potential for development. While restituting of the homecraft within the relevant artistic medium they act as prospectors of the past, they try to hear the tune of the unfeigned tradition through the noise and interference. But they are also prospectors of the future, since many predictions of the image of future society deal with archaic categories, on the one hand, and post-industrial tendencies, on the other.