Partisans With a Hoe - Spontaneous Gardening in Urban Space by Ivana Balcaříková

This project combines artistic and anthropological research on spontaneous gardening in open public space, predominantly in Brno, CZ. The team, mostly comprising recent graduates and graduate students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology, chose gardens and plantings which were, in most cases, rather exceptional. Unlike most typical front gardens, the ones in this study are somehow peculiar, due to their location, their composition and planting schemes, their scale, or methods of those who garden there. The anthropologists on the team analyzed a Facebook group dedicated to street gardening and conducted several interviews, while the artistic team responded to particular places with which they interacted. Some results of this research have been presented to the public in the form of an application comprising an audioguide and an interactive map; this exposition in the Research catalogue documents some of these findings. The team Barbora Lungová is a visual artist and has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology since 2007. Her field of practice is painting and art projects focusing on plants, gardening, and queerness. She is the coordinator of the Partisans with a Hoe project. Lucia Bergamaschi is a visual artist working across the media of photography, sound, and installation. She earned an MA in Fine Art at Università Iuav di Venezia and an MA in Law at Università di Bologna. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Nela Maruškevičová combines painting, installations, and glass in her artistic practice. She is a 2023 graduate of the FFA BUT. Kateřina Konvalinová is a visual artist interested in the overlapping spaces of art, communal life, farming, and ritual. She earned her MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and is currently a doctoral student at the FFA BUT. Iva Balcaříková is a graphic designer and a member of the team behind the curated audio walks created by Galerie Art in Brno. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Hana Drštičková is a visual artist and a social anthropologist interested in environmental and queer topics. She graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the FFA BUT in 2022 and with a BA in social anthropology from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Masaryk University and is currently a doctoral student at the Gender Studies Department of Charles University in Prague. Anastasia Blokhina is a social anthropologist who graduated with an MA tfrom the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University in 2022. Polyna Davydenko is a photographer and a video artist who documents social and environmental issues in her work, most recently those connected with the war in Ukraine. Filip Dušek is a media artist who studied at the Department of Photography at the FFA BUT. The project was conducted under the Specific Research FaVU-S-23-8441 Program.

Out of town stops: Kyjov

Bára Lungová

I moved to my present studio in 2012. It is a disused heating station, which serviced the surrounding apartment buildings. The area was redeveloped just on the eve of the fall of the communist regime in 1988/89. Before that, it was a street of village-type housing with large gardens. This area is just a two-minute walk to the town square, but looks as if it was a suburb. The two parks which were incorporated into the urban design of this location in the 1980s have been built over in the last two decades: a new apartment building was constructed on one of the previous parks in the early 2000s, and a parking lot replaced the other park in 2014. The rest of the patch of green was “revitalized,” (as the city council jargon says) two years later, making it another small parking lot. In other words: when I started renting the boiler house in 2012, it was completely surrounded by greenery, and now it sits in the middle of two parking lots.

When it comes to inhabitants’ preferences for parking places or trees, the former always win. It is a pattern that has unfailingly repeated itself in my hometown over the years. A bunch of people try to protest, but the loud majority, supported by the council administration, always favors the maximalist reconstruction plans, which destroy the majority of lawns and trees and includes the maximum possible number of parking spaces.

Before the space directly in front of my studio was rebuilt into a parking lot, I cultivated a small garden composed of wild grasses and a semi-formal flower bed. (I did it guerilla-style, just taking over the space gradually.) Before the reconstruction, I even organized a public gathering in the place itself where I had invited people from the neighboring houses to see the plan of the reconstruction (which the city council did not care to publish online), to enjoy some music and cake, and to fill in a questionnaire in case they wanted to express their opinion of the plan of the reconstruction.

Despite the fact that I delivered answers to the city council by nearly fifty respondents, of whom almost four-fifths were against more parking lots, the council organized their own gathering, where loud supporters of the parking lot prevailed, and construction started just two months after the public hearing. When the reconstruction was finished, I started planting shrubs and plants in the spaces that planners had left for greenery (I actually negotiated some of these spaces – at the time, I was a backbench council member of the city government and a member of the environmental advisory board to the council. The board’s view of the parking lot-vs.-park dilemma had been passive, i.e., silently supporting the parking lot). I planted several rambler roses and a climbing vine, and gradually started expanding with my “garden” into the large parking lot. I have since created a flowering border, which now contains 45 varieties of chrysanthemums and 15-20 iris varieties, combined with other plants which complement the irises in their flowering season. This year, I have planted about ten more rambler roses and a young acer tree. I want to bomb this desolate space which was a park just ten years ago with beauty, even if it is just at the fringes.

As I do the gardening, I often interact with people. Several of the neighbors regularly chat with me about everyday things including my plants, the weather, or other small things; other people comment on the plants or the aesthetic aspects of the borders, or even ask me for plants in some cases. Sometimes they comment on the fact that some people pluck my flowers (I don’t mind as long as they do not damage them; in fact, if this is something that can brighten their day, then my garden is all the more purposeful). Different people come near my studio. There is someone who uses it as a free gardening center, and customarily steals my potted seedlings and cuttings which I grow just below my studio windows. Then there is the occasional pair of teenage girls who sit and chat between my flower pots; once I saw them kissing. After that, I put a rainbow heart sticker I got at some Pride march on the window, just to tell them they have chosen the right spot for their dates

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Ivana Balcaříková, Barbora Lungova - Partisans With a Hoe - Spontaneous Gardening in Urban Space - 2025