Olga Grotova

Our Grandmothers’ Gardens

Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions. The detainees were often subjected to rape and violence—a horrific chapter in Soviet history that is persistently covered up by the Russian state. The family’s garden was set up with the help of other former inmates of the gulag camp and became a site where trauma could be processed through engagement with the earth. In 2021, Grotova and her mother Tatiana traveled back to the Urals to find the garden. On their journey they visited communities wrecked by deindustrialization and extreme pollution, and met women who still garden to regain autonomy from the state.

Our Grandmothers’ Gardens presents an installation of photograms made using an intricate process developed by the artist which layers the traces of plants, debris, and women’s belongings found in the gardens with drawings, soils, and pigments. Grotova’s process of layering, erasing, and rearranging is connected to her grandmothers’ daily labor of digging and planting; acts that aided in processing their trauma. By employing the camera-less (and less precise) technique of the photogram, Grotova transfers agency to the plants and objects that are intertwined with the lives of the women who tended the gardens. The installation is juxtaposed with highly constructed propaganda images from Soviet magazines such as Peasant Woman and Gardening from the 1950s-1960s. The work critiques the state-commissioned photographs of women for their connection with Soviet colonization and oppression, notably in the Soviet republics that have been drained of resources and harvests for the benefit of the Russian state. The photograms give voice to the debris and the discarded, much like the women’s voices drowned out by patriarchal structures.