A garden that didn’t happen
Painted apricot and plum stones, video, 2023
My grandmother Vira and grandfather Serhiy have a village house with the garden near Shestakove, Chuhuiv district, 30 km to the East from Kharkiv, Ukraine. They’ve been taking care of it for more than 12 years now. Right in front of their main gates, across the road, there is a large field that belongs to a local agricultural company. On that field, the company would grow wheat, sunflowers and corn, and always they would keep it empty for a one year so that the soil could rest and restore. On the 24th of February 2022 the full scale invasion of Russia began, and the area where my grandparents’ village house and the field are situated were occupied very quickly. Grandma and grandpa couldn’t go to their house and the garden, and no workers were able to go to the field to clean it from the remains of previous year’s culture (it was sunflowers) and sow it for the new agricultural season.
And despite this area was liberated by Ukrainian Army in May of the same year, only in summer 2023 people were allowed to re-enter it – because, as everywhere else where Russia could reach, every square kilometre of land was covered with mines. My grandparents started working in their garden again, though almost two years of abandonment affected it a lot – and for sure it will no longer be as blossoming and fruitful as it used to be before the invasion. The field was cleaned from the remains of dry and dead sunflowers in September this year, and one of the tractors hit a mine, a worker survived but got severely injured. Since then, the field remains empty. For now it is impossible to understand how much of it is still mined, and to estimate how soon it can be sowed again.
In 2019, I started collecting apricot and plum stones. I painted them with white paint – I had no idea what for, but was sure that it will soon come to me. Two years later, I decided that I need much and much more of those stones, I thought maybe the concept for my future work which I felt was somewhere very close will finally reveal itself. Together with my mother we asked our friends and acquaintances, my grandparents and their friends and acquaintances, to give us stones from apricots and plums that were left after making pies, pastry and jams. It was a rich fruit harvest that year in our region, so most of the stones came from the local gardens. Altogether we managed to collect 2880 apricot and plum stones during that summer, the last pre- war summer in Ukraine.
The stones stayed in my home apartment in Saltivka, one of the most intensively bombed neighbourhoods in the north-east of Kharkiv. For more than two years they’ve lost their fertility, but also were forgotten as a material for art. Until several weeks before I needed to leave for my next residency in Czech Republic, I re-discovered them on my balcony when I visited Kharkiv in October 2023. And the clear concept of an art project about the apricot and plum stones came to me, finally, after all these years. Then, I couldn’t pack them in my bag, as they wouldn’t let me go through the customs at the EU border. My mother suggested that she would send all the stones to me an a package by post, so that I could receive them in Austria where I’m based and bring them to Czechia. She sent the parcel with Ukrainian postal service «Nova Poshta», in the night of the 22d of October the main terminal of this company in Kharkiv region, where all the parcels were accumulated before being sent to the destination points, was hit by a Russian rocket, causing a huge fire, 8 deaths and a lot of injures. My parcel, containing 2880 apricot and plum stones, left the terminal just one hour before the tragedy.
At the exhibition «Gardening of Soul» in House of Arts, Usti-nad-Labem, Czech Republic, painted in white these stones represent ghosts of the apricot and plum trees that will never be able to grow. And the projection of the footage depicting the field in front of my grandparents’ village house represent the ghost of the land that for a long time won’t be able to become a garden again.
