Introduction
Bára Lungová, Hana Drštičková, Anastasia Blokhina, Lucia Bergamaschi, Nela Maruškevičová, Kateřina Konvalinová, Ivana Balcaříková, Polina Davydenko
What you are about to explore is the result of a collaboration between visual artists and social anthropologists who came up with the idea of mapping the phenomenon of spontaneous gardening in Brno according to the methods of their respective disciplines.
The motivation behind inviting social anthropologists alongside artists was inspired by the need to understand the motivations of people who practice gardening in public space, outside of their comfort zone, risking more potential obstacles and perhaps even confrontation with authorities. The primary impulse for this decision was in fact the spontaneous gardening practices of the author of this introduction herself. While the artistic interventions were observant and actional (in that chronological order) and resulted in artworks that responded to a particular environment, the anthropological interventions were observant and analytical and likewise responded to particular gardening practices. The anthropologists analyzed the practices of spontaneous gardeners within a broader social context, while the artworks responded to the emotional perceptions of a particular place and highlighted one of the significant phenomena of exactly that place.
In countries such as the USA, grassroots activities reclaiming public space for gardening has been practiced for decades, often as a response to issues of food sovereignty and a reclaiming of the commons. Artistic reflection of tensions between private property development, the ideals of the commons, the right to access to green space, and notions of a“fruitful” utilization of space were explored in the 1970s and 1980s in important artworks such as Alan Sonfist’s Time Capsule or Agnes Denes’s Wheat Field. Leap ahead several decades – we find that artists have been instrumental in establishing urban orchards or community gardens in hundreds of places.
While artistic projects typically require at least some small amount of funding and a basic legal structure (such as a lease agreement, etc.), some projects which are inspiring and fun at the same time have been carried out in a gray zone known as “guerilla gardening.” For instance, The US-based Guerilla Grafters initiative is one example of the aforementioned issues of commoning the urban landscape – their work involves making it edible. Guerilla Grafters select ornamental trees in public space and graft edible fruit varieties onto them. Their activities are framed by opposition to the context of urban landscaping that conceptualizes greenery as an element of aesthetic and ecosystem services within the urban fabric, but does not take into account the“agricultural” potential of urban spaces. While the aesthetic approach (as opposed to an“antiquated” and“out-of-place” agricultural approach) is understandable from the perspective of modernist urban planning, different historical and cultural experiences and perspectives also exist.
In Central Europe, for instance, it used to be common to plant fruit trees both alongside roads in the open countryside and along the streets of villages and small towns until the mid- 20th century. Likewise, the context of urban gardening in continental Europe is greatly determined by the significant presence of allotment gardens in the urban texture. Although allotments in big cities were frequently set up on“unproductive” land or on land inaccessible to heavy machinery, in Brno, for instance, they were established in “land reserves,” with some of them are located in the close vicinity of the city center.
These allotments are essentially beautiful apricot orchards that at the end of March cover the city hilltops in pink. However, the allotments are compact areas of several hundred private or semi-private gardens and are clearly demarcated from the surrounding areas. In small towns, especially those of South Moravia, early post-war housing developments were established with the“urban peasant” in mind: the borders between park-like open space, decorative front gardens, and productive back gardens mingled with each other. While the large central lawns were expected to be mowed by municipal companies, the front ornamental gardens and the back or nearby productive gardens were maintained by the residents. The important historical factor to consider when thinking about planting in public space is public participation in the construction of housing estates during the communist era. As the councils were the construction investors, they also expected local residents (or, the co-op members) to plant and maintain the surrounding greenery. This was typically done through so-called “Actions Z,” which took place on a regular basis several times a year and in which residents were expected to clean up and tend to the area adjacent to the houses. Ornamental front gardens in housing estates were a common sight even in the 1990s and early 2000s. As the first generation of housing-estate residents aged, however, the front gardens gradually began to disappear and became replaced by lawns. Communal responsibility for public space has waned since the 1990s, and is now understood by residents to be solely in the hands of the municipal companies. This fact not withstanding, there are still places in cities – typically adjacent to these buildings – that residents spontaneously take care of. Some municipalities are aware of the fact, and have even attempted to encourage people to take this responsibility into their own hands, or tried to legalize the gardening conducted in this gray zone by launching so-called“greenery adoption schemes.” Still, there are plenty of instances in which people garden in public spaces outside of these structures.
As it turns out, the instances of residents’ interventions in public open space via gardening in Brno and its surroundings are mostly of a decorative, rather than of a productive, character. At this point, we can only hypothesize about the mix of possible factors behind this phenomenon: is it the relative availability of other productive gardens? Is it the fear that fruits and veggies will be stolen or spoiled if not fenced off? Or do these gardeners fear accusations of attempts to privatize public space for their own gain? Or does the very design of public space — and the real and assumed regulations forming it – deter prospective gardeners from sowing and hoeing? In fact, these are questions which only surfaced as our year-long research came to its conclusion. Nevertheless, bottom-up and top-down radical initiatives in some U.S. and Western European cities, such as Incredible Edible (in Todmorden, UK) or the Edible Cities Network, are showing that it is perfectly possible to grow fruit trees and vegetables – even in the streets, in public parks, and in other public places. Sometimes, initiatives of this kind are conceived as an artistic project, such as Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates or Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins’ Dundee Urban Orchards.
While so far we have focused on different strategies of“inserting” agricultural rather than horticultural practices in urban contexts, looking both at artistic and“hands-on” approaches in which to do so(they often merge), it is also important to mention the fascination of some contemporary artists with the presence of wilderness in the urban fabric and their version of“gardening” with “elements of wildness” in their artworks. Artists with backgrounds in contemporary visual art, such as Helen and Newton Harrison, Lois Weinberger, or Abraham Cruzvillegas, worked outside the landscaping context and took weeds, ruderal plants, plant societies, and plant succession cycles both as their material and the concept to work with, while critically entangling the resultant artworks with particular types of urban places.
“Ruderal gardens” can take on a form of a memorial,, a portable ecosystem superimposed onto a sterile architectonic order, a fault line running through otherwise meticulously maintained park vegetation; a meadow ecosystem can be saved and transplanted onto a gallery roof to serve both as an education piece and as a future seed bank for the city parks.
The above-mentioned examples of artworks use plants that we associate with nature and chaos breaking into urban order. Annual plants, ruderal weeds, and shrubs populate abandoned lots, voids in an otherwise organized city structure. A research team around Radan Haluzík comprising social scientists, natural scientists, theoreticians of architecture, and artists dedicated their research project to such voids, which they have called“vague terrain.” In their understanding, it is land deprived of function, the“dark matter” filling up the space between urban structure, the“inverse city,” the chaos complementing the order of urban planning, and
its role as the“leftovers,”, terrain which is precarious in space or time.
It is in this context that we wanted to reflect on and respond to spontaneous gardening interventions in Brno and several other locations.
As we conducted our preliminary research, we came across several interesting instances of gardens or spaces which were probably not cared for within the greenery adoption schemes. The gardens and plantings which we have chosen to focus on are, in most cases, not typical but exceptional, such as the“railway gardens” or the“tree stump” flower pot.Unlike most front gardens, they are peculiar, due to their location, their composition and/or planting schemes, their scale, or the methods of those who garden in them. Apart from these spaces, we found out about other interesting gardening examples through a Facebook discussion group called“Street Gardeners from Brno and Beyond” where our social anthropologists – Hana Drčtičková and Anastasia Blokhina – used the first stage of their research to analyze the general mode of discourse in the above-mentioned fFacebook group. Their aim was to observe what kind of ideasthe users pursued about gardening in public space and, gardening practices, as well as the motivations both for carrying out these practices and contributing to the discussion. In the second phase of their research, they looked for gardeners who would be willing to share their insights both about their gardening practices, about their relationship to public space where they acted, and about their emotional ties both to that space and to their gardening. Hana and Nasťa sought out the diversity of practices and informants, which the Facebook group helped reveal.
They also interviewed several other gardeners who were recommended to us. In total, they conducted fiveinterviews, completed by other two carried by the author of this introduction.
In our artistic projects, we were interested in exactly those types of spaces, either intervening in them or depicting them as landscapes(meaning the artistic genre) via the language of contemporary art. Lucia Bergamaschi made a soundscape evoking a long-abandoned space behind an abandoned factory which has been grown over by shrubs and pioneer tree species. Despite its location in the city center just a few meters from a busy street, it is an oasis of wildlife; Lucia’s art is an attempt to extend this oasis — even if only via an audio recording — into the street itself. Nela Maruškevičová was preoccupied in her project by vacant lots around Brno and by the plants populating them. She collected seeds of the ruderal plants and later planted them in small boxes — each box representing one site and only the mixture of plants growing there. She placed these boxes in the courtyards of three important city galleries so that visitors could observe the life cycles and beauty of these plants directly, in“cultured” places where they would not be expected to exist. Kateřina Konvalinová started with the observation of a guerilla gardening intervention on Mánes Bridge where someone planted rosemary in a long-abandoned concrete planter that was part of the original architecture. She connected it with a folk song about rosemary growing on Prague bridge, composed her own version adapted to Brno, and planted a rosemary plant near a railway bridge in Brno called unbelievably The Prague Viaduct. Barbora Lungová has been remaking the weedy fringes of a(no longer) new parking lot into a lush flowering garden for several years and has now documented it in an autoethographic text. She also visited several other sites in public space on which people have been gardening in various ways and documented them in texts accompanied by photographs by Polina Davydenko.
From the onset, our primary goal was to make an audio guide with a map of a route that would be possible to complete in a few hours on foot. We invited Ivana Balcaříková, a member of the SocialMaps collective, which is developing a map app providing collectively created maps. Their aim is to remake the mapping process into a social activity and provide users an authentic experience of places. The collective cooperated for two years with Galerie ART for whom they created audio walks with diverse themes. The application on which users can now use to walk along our route will in the future host audio walks with other topics as well. Iva designed the route and the application, and also served as layout artist for this exposition.
The final route, with twelve stops, encompasses gardens of some of the respondents we interviewed, but also maps instances of guerilla gardening whose authors would be very difficult to find, unless we wanted to spy on them. For those locations, we have included only our textual interpretations and photo documentation. The more interactive artistic interventions can be found at four locations on the tour route in Brno’s city center. These were created by three of our team members – Nela Maruškevičová,Lucia Bergamaschi, and Kateřina Konvalinová – as a response to particular sites of“vague terrain” with their typical vegetation and atmosphere. This exposition at the Journal of Artistic Researchalso includes two sites which are not included in the map for the audio guide. One of them is a short auto–ethnographic
text on the experience of street gardening in Kyjov, a small town near Brno, written by Barbora Lungová. Another one is a text describing a very peculiar front garden in a small housing development in Senica, a Slovak town near the Czech border. We hope that despite the fact that our virtual tour is not fully comprehensive, we have managed to cover different aspects and approaches to spontaneous gardening, both from a more“utilitarian” and a more“speculative” perspective.
A note on the terminology. We use the term“spontaneous gardening” rather than“guerilla gardening,” as the latter term is frequently associated with social and political activism. With the exception of two or three cases, the gardening practices we focus on or enact ourselves are not executed with those aims primarily in mind; the gardeners do not grow“despite" circumstances, but take up the opportunity or a potential a place near them offers.
For those of you who find yourselves in Brno, you can walk the route and listen to the twelve recordings on www.socialmaps.app.
